Is it possible to visualize how a human eye would see Pillars of Creation in real time? This always confused me with Hubble’s colorized photos.
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.