What does NASA mean when they say an image is ';false color';?

The Hubble telescope shows us beautiful color shots of nebulas and such. Would it look that way from a spaceship window? Or is the ';false color'; a way of adding what the human eye can't see? Why don't they just take real color photos from the telescope if they're really colorful images?What does NASA mean when they say an image is ';false color';?
False color is a way of making fine details in an image more apparent to the eye. Most things in space are very, very faint, so if you were looking out the window of a spacecraft, it would not look the way things look in long-exposure photos such as those on Astronomy Photo of the Day. From those sorts of photos, though, they can tell that part of the image is, say, hydrogen, another part oxygen, and so on. They will then sometimes use a computer to falsely color the various parts of the image so that your eye can discern where the various image components are in relation to one another. Other answerers are also correct. That's what false color means. I hope that was no color at all (clear).What does NASA mean when they say an image is ';false color';?
A false-color image is an image that depicts a subject in colors that differ from human perception of the same subject
A false color image won't have the same colors as what you would see if you looked at it directly. There are a number of reasons do make false color images. For example, it is possible to increase the contrast of an image so as to make some process you are interested in more visible. This is one of the most common reasons to do false color imaging. Another is to make images in, say, infrared, visible to us. Unless some way is used to shift the 'colors', we simply wouldn't be able to see anything. Other reasons can stem from the way that the images are processed in the chips used to make them.
The hubble, (or other telescope) may take an image using either sensors or filters sensitive to other than visible light, such as x-rays, infra red, or ultra violet.





But, to display it so that it can be better analyzed, the colors may be adjusted to that we can study them in the visible light spectrum. In infra red images, for examples, which displays degrees of heat, white may be displayed to show areas of greatest heat, stepping down through yellow, orange, red, violet and down to blue. Heat does not shine in these colors, so when you see an image described as infra red, it is actually displayed in false colors.
It just means that they assigned a color to a particular category of data in a field...





For example, a digital x-ray image is just a bunch of numbers..however, if you assign a different color to the measured intensity of each pixel...you get a false color image...





Same with infra-red, ultraviolet, etc.
For the last part of your question... the false color images reveal information that is not visible in the spectrum of light that humans perceive, but that information is scientifically significant. The visual spectrum is just a small portion of the full electro-magnetic spectrum. Collecting data in the near infrared, ultraviolet, hydrogen alpha, OIII, SII, and other portions of the spectrum is valuable in determining the elemental composition of objects. If specific colors weren't assigned to that data, colors that we can see, then collecting that data would be pointless. It's just a way of making visible that which is normally invisible to us.
They do take color picture but I would assume that there are Blue and Red Shifts involved.