Digital photography

I think I read somewhere that a large proportion of, if not all, spectacular images of space/nature are colour enhanced in some way, so I'd hazard a guess that they just create them themselves with saturation, layers, filters etc. You can do incredible things with even the most basic of editing software, provided the detail is there in the image to begin with.

The complex electronic detectors in the Hubble telescope for example, only provide images in black and white. Literally every colour image you've seen from Hubble will have been created by someone in post-production. Usually for one of a number of reasons: colour corrected for a 'like-the-human-eye representation', wildy incorrect colours to accentuate structural details, enhanced for sheer beauty etc.

You're not going to get as rich colour on a 1" sensor compact compared with a high-end full-frame DSLR, though. And any noise reduction will mute the colour rendition.