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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

They seem to be really dancing around the fact of whether or not this is greater angular resolution than the Hubble ultra-deep field with qualifiers like "greater than Hubble in infrared" or talking about how fast it was. Does this image resolve smaller details than the ultra deep field or not?

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Hubble is able to take higher resolution (smaller angular resolution) pictures in it's optimum wavelengths. Even though JWST has a larger light bucket, the photons its capturing are longer wavelength so the end result is a lower resolution.

You asked in another comment "Are the finest details in this picture finer than the finest details in the Hubble ultra-deep field?".

In a sense, yes since the finest details in this photo are of a wavelength that Hubble isn't sensitive too, so they are visible here but do not show up in an equivalent Hubble shot.

It is complicated and wavelength dependent. In near infrared, Hubble and JWST have about the same resolution. As the frequency moves further into infrared, JWST is better than Hubble. The other things that affect how clear an image is are “point spread function” - how much light gets scattered. And how steady the telescope can be held on one spot. Both of these capabilities are better for JWST than Hubble.

Again the evasive language. I'm not talking about the technical specs, I'm talking this dang picture. This one. Are the finest details in this picture finer than the finest details in the Hubble ultra-deep field?

Are “the finest details” of an X-ray of your wrist finer than a screen grab from a camera phone video of your wrist?

This picture is not the actual image data from JWST, but rather an interpretation of infrared data.

If you're only asking about the details in this picture, my understanding is that JWST is better though not by orders of magnitude.

However the actual answer is that the two telescopes are not easily comparable in this fashion.

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