alt Hacker NewsTangential, but sometimes real images can also seem unreal. I remember seeing a photo of Earth and the Moon with the Moon on the foreground that looked like a bad CGI. But it was actually a photograph taken by a space probe. Or, one can think about those photos of the Apollo lunar module that looked "wrong" (and probably helped some conspiracy theories spread), but were obviously correct - just there's no atmosphere to speak of on the Moon, so no light scattering etc. That said often, space images actually use "false colors" [1]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-colors-in...
Condensed rant: We are blind to the most common gasses on our planet (N2, O2) and sometimes have difficulty perceiving its most common liquid (H20). This is sensible, since otherwise we'd wander off cliffs in the fog and be eaten by giant carnivorous bats. We must be blind to one thing in order to detect another.
If some aliens arrived at our planet and said: "Wow, your planet is the most-boring we've ever seen, it's all just one N2-colored ball", we'd be a little offended: Clearly, they're looking at it wrong!
Flip that in reverse, and we have an artistic obligation to choose "good colors" for planets that maximizes their interesting features.