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Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

“Webb observes near infrared to mid infrared light”

Interesting. I thought all the fuss was because it would be in the visible spectrum (i.e. nice magazine photos and desktop backgrounds)

Disclaimer: I know very little about astrophotography

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Almost all colour astrophotographs you see are made up of a composite of many bands, like UV, IR, X-ray, etc (and visible), with colours mapped to the different wavelengths. The instruments collect many wavelengths because it allows us to see through certain things, as well as recognise certain elements and phenomena from their spectrum.

Jinx!

Almost all images you see from space probes are false color - they approximate what it might look like or what might look pleasing to the human eye. There will be plenty of awesome images coming out of this bad boy.

This would be a good quick hack project-- a program that accurately blueshifts JWST images.

You can see the list of NIRCam filters here: http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/nircam/in_filters.php#wavelen...

Only F070W is partly human-visible, everything else is off into infrared, as you'd expect.

Oh neat a picture of nothing

Because the universe is expanding the older and farther away light is the redder it looks to us. So by collecting this infrared light we can see farther back in time than we could with any other instrument before.

Here's a band comparison between UV+visible and infrared (from the JWST Wikipedia page) that I thought was fitting given the question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#/me...

It’s a good range for a wide variety of science, especially above the atmosphere.

Also a good range to sniff the atmospheres of earth sized planets for chemical composition, if everything works just right.

In theory Webb might be able to sniff out a water/nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, some thought to most likely come from plant life.

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