Does this mean what Hubble sees is actually closer to what I'd see with my own eyes than Hubble, or Hubble's version is closer?
That in image in "Hubble pallet" or SHO. It's an image where the colors come from three extremely narrow spectral bands that have better contrast in astronomical images because they show ionized gasses with less noise from dust reflected blackblody light.
Red=sulphur line, Green=Hydrogen line Blue=oxygen line.
The oxygen line appear blue-green to the human eye, and the Hydrogen alpha line is a dim far red color that the eye isn't very sensitive to, the sulphur line is even further towards the infrared, barely visible at all.
About what you'd see from a 16 inch telescope in a superb dark sky location. A red smudge with hints of finer detail.
Given its size the density is probably pretty low, though. If you got right up next to it you wouldn't see much, in the same way a fog bank gets less visible when you walk towards it.
With so many colorized photos of space objects and so many artist impressions, I wasn’t sure whether space is just a black void to the human eye or we are capable of seeing the gorgeous colors of different nebulae and such.
We don't spend oodles of money to build sensitive instruments to observe things you could see with the unaided eye.
If you've ever been to a dark sky location so that you could see the Milky Way, then that's about what you'd see. Our eyes just are not sensitive enough to pick out colors. Even in a telescope, viewing objects like Orion's Nebula, which is incredibly bright, it is just B&W in the eye piece. Viewing Andromeda galaxy is also just B&W.
There is no way you could see this with your own eyes, there's no vantage point you can "stand on" to see the pillars - you'd either be too far away to see anything, or if you moved close enough so your eyes could actually focus on something, you'd be "inside" it, meaning you would see one star at most.
Which is a roundabout way of also saying: the nebula and Earth are in a gravitaionally bound system (the Milky Way) where gravity overpowers whatever it is that's causing cosmic inflation. So even if their orbital motions result in a redshift as currently viewed from Earth, the amount of redshift contributed by inflation (if any) is undetectable.
That said, if you know the orbits of two bodies, and can predict their motion relative to one another, you could calculate the expected red or blue shift, as viewed from one of those bodies, at any point in their orbits. :)
Edit: missing words