…We are not just limited to ‘seeing’ in visible light… …we can use e/m waves from across the spectrum to image objects.

Messier 87 (M87), a giant elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster as imaged in a wide field view from the Hubble Space Telescope

A radio image of Messier 87 (M87), a giant elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster by the Very Large Array (VLA), and an image of the center section by a Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) consisting of antennas in the US, Germany, Italy, Finland, Sweden and Spain. The jet of particles is suspected to be powered by a black hole in the center of the galaxy.

An image of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation from the The COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite

A Radar image of Hurricane Katrina A Radar image of Hurricane Katrina. Radar stands for “Radio Detection and Ranging”, though it in fact uses microwaves!

…we can image in Infrared… …and produce false-colour images called ‘thermograms’…

…or we can image in ultraviolet… …or in x-rays…

Three portraits with different spectral responses Three portraits with different spectral responses. UV on the left (335-365nm) Visible in the middle (440-640nm) and Infrared on the right (720-850nm)

An X-ray image of a man involved in an accident…

This is an X-ray image of a broken AC joint in the the shoulder…

Gamma ray imaging is used here to reveal regions of nuclear radiation at the Fukushima Nuclear power station.

…we can even use sound waves to collect data… …and create an image of something we could not otherwise see…

…we can even use sound waves to collect data… …and create an image of something we could not otherwise see…

…in fact we can create false-colour images of any data we like… …like this image showing ozone density…

This image was obtained using a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope

…an STM measures currents resulting from the tunnelling of electrons… …and we can use this data to produce images of a surface on an atomic/molecular scale…!

…even optical images are very often collected and stored digitally now… …using, for example, a ccd (charge coupled device). …the ‘photograph’ produced is actually reconstructed from the numerical values of the voltages stored in each picture element..!