James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
webbtelescope.org
webbtelescope.org
Stephan's Quintet (NIRCam and MIRI Composite Image):
https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7DB1FHPMJCCY59CQGZC1YJQ.png
Southern Ring Nebula (NIRCam and MIRI Images Side by Side):
https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G79R28V7S4AXDN8NG5QCPGE3.png
“Cosmic Cliffs” in the Carina Nebula (NIRCam Image):
https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7ETPF7DVBJAC42JR5N6EQRH.png
Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam Image):
https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7DDBW5NNXTJV8PGHB0465QP.png
Exoplanet WASP-96 b (NIRISS Transmission Spectrum):
> Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam Image)
Is this image distorted in any way at all? It feels like the galaxies are somehow oriented around a center spot. Not all of them, but enough to give the image a distorted feeling. Probably it's just my mind pattern matching against something that doesn't really exist.
Other features include the prominent arcs in this field. The powerful gravitational field of a galaxy cluster can bend the light rays from more distant galaxies behind it, just as a magnifying glass bends and warps images. Stars are also captured with prominent diffraction spikes, as they appear brighter at shorter wavelengths.
[0] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2...
Can this be adjusted for?
Wouldnt the pico-arc of the overall array affect the image output due to the distances involved such that we receive "false gravitational lensing, simply based on distance from the sensor"
?
I wonder if a more precise version(s) of the hex lenses could be made such that they can 'normal-ize' on a much more refined basis.
I know that each JWT is already capable of mico-flexes to each cell... but if we can develope an even further refinement (Moores law on the JWTs hex lenses resolution) we will be able to make thousands of images with varying the the normalization to each receiving area and comparing image quality.
Also, I am sure there are folks who know the reflective characteristics of photons from each wavelength that would allow for orientations for each wavelength.
--
Do ALL 'light' wavelengths, particles bounce off the reflector materials in the same way? - meaning do infra waves/photons bounce in the exact same way as some other wavelength with the exact same orientation of the sensor?
---
Do they do any 'anti-gravitational-lensing' correction calcs to 'anti-bend' a photons path to us to 're-normalize' the path that we should have seen?
Whats the current science behind such?
I worded that poorly ;
Wouldn't one be able to adjust the perceived path of the photon after time, to adjust for re-normalizing the path of the photon based on the understanding of the gravitational arc imposed on such -- meaning the astro equivalent of "ZOOM. ENHANCE!" :-)
Lets assume you have a 'straight' vector of line of sight pointing your Earthly-Bound-Lens [hubble/jswt/whatever] at the object of interest.
you also have an idea through previous observations of gallaxies on the line of sight, which will have gravitational impact on the trajectory of the photons of interest...
the arrival photon's wiggle represents a wobble in time to get to earth. Meaning it changed phase multiple times between our sensor receiving it, and its origin.
If one could look at the path and the grav-lenses it went through, one may be able to extrapolate a more clear picture at various distances(times)....??? /r/NoStupidQuestions
( I am picturing a straight shot - but the photon traveled between many other celstials - and those
Eg, you'd normally see the side view of an object, but the lensing gets you the top and bottom views
Meaning that no matter waht, when we speak of gravitational lenses, we could, usting JWST account for the "wobble" of a photon, nased on the accurate knowledge of where a body was, via measuring through multiples of JSWT observations... (ideally through actually multiple JWSTs, in differnt locations)
The idea being that if we can triangulate a more precice location between earth [A] and galaxy [N] - set of all galaxies/bodies/whatever,
We may be able to calculate the influence of gravity lens upon phont differentials based on when they came from and how far...
Ultimately making adjustments to the output of an image \based on super deep-field focus which is effectively selecting to the phtons of interest... and we can basically "carbon date" the accuracy of an image with a higher resolution?
What i think is pretty cool is that the gravity lens actually allowed hubble to see galaxies it may have not ever seen had there not been a gravity lens and now that we have JWST we see many more distant galaxies (and more of the same galaxy reflected in more positions)
What does jupiter, PLUTO look like from these lenses???
THE FUCKING MOON
WE SPENT *BILLIONS* -- Why dont we have live streams?
GO FUCK YOUR NSA
--
WHO PAID FOR IT.
The data should be global. define a SINGLE national defense trope. and back it up.
The EHT images are created using synthetic aperture techniques to create an effective aperture with a diameter of earth's orbit around the sun. But this is only currently possible at radio frequencies due to our ability to capture, store, and coherently combine the phase information. It's essentially SDR beam forming across space and time.
We can also study black holes though visible and IR observations through their effects of the things around them-- lensing from their mass, matter heated up by falling in. Here is an image I took of the relativistic speed matter jet believed to originate from black hole in M87: https://nt4tn.net/astro/#M87jet ... and Webb can do a lot better than I can with a camera lens in my back yard. :)
Aside, there is some controversy about the EHT black hole images. A recent paper claims to be able to reproduce the ring like images using the EHT's imaging process and a simulated point source-- raising the question of the entire image just being a processing artifact. https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/m87-ring-or-arte... Though it's not surprising to see concerns raised around cutting edge signal processing-- LIGO suffered from a bit of that, for example, but confidence there has been improved by a significant number of confirming observations (including optical confirmations of ligo events).
Another question: are they already planning a successor to JWST? Is something better even possible? If it took more than 30 years, we should start sooner than later :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAFIR is the closest to a proposed JWST successor; the others largely serve different purposes.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... is correct. No NASA planning, including for space telescopes, shows any understanding of how much Starship changes the game. Instead of one, we can put up a network of telescopes. And try out crazy ideas.
Here is a concrete example. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231032662_A_Cryogen... lays out how a 100 meter telescope could be erected on the Moon to study the early universe with several orders of magnitude better resolution than the JWST. The total weight of their design is around 8 tons. With traditional NASA technologies, transport of the material alone is over $30 billion and it had better work. With Starship, transportation is in the neighborhood of $10 million. Suppose that precision equipment added $40 million to the cost. Using Starship, for the cost of the JWST, we can put 200 missions of this complexity in space. Using a variety of different experimental ideas. And if only half of them worked, we'd still be 99 telescopes ahead of the JWST.
So where is Starship? It is on the pad, undergoing testing. They have a list of 75 environmental things to take care of before launch. Which means that they likely launch this month or next. At the planned construction cadence, even if the first 3 blow up, by Christmas it should be a proven technology.
Small correction: The EHT is a synthetic aperture telescope the size of the Earth, not the size of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
Synthetic aperture telescopes need both amplitude & phase information from each observing station & have to combine the phase of simultaneous observations in order to create the final image. We can’t do this on the scale of the earth’s orbit, because we don’t have a radio telescope on the far side of the sun!
Maybe one day ...
You, sir, have just contributed a prime example of HN comments at their best. Your astrophotography is outstanding. Thank you for sharing! :)
This image shows profound "gravitational lensing", which you know. But what you might not know is that is precisely _why_ they chose to photograph it.
This galaxy cluster (SMACS 0723) may be the most well known and powerful gravitational lens we have observed. The galaxies shown distorted around the edges are actually behind the lens, but are magnified by it. This means we can see even farther in this region of space than normal, because we compound the power of the JWST with the power of this natural lens.
It all adds up to providing the "deepest" view of the universe yet, allowing us to see galaxies at a distance of more than 13.2B lightyears. This lets us see structures formed in the infancy of the universe, that wouldn't be possible looking at most other points in the sky, or even anywhere else in this deep field besides the perimeter of the lens in the middle.
I just wish NASA had provided a link at the bottom of their low-res image pages to intermediate sized images (~4k) for desktop viewing.
However, after spending 10 minutes on mobile this morning, I was unable to find any high resolution images, and many images had that anti-pattern of a BS HTML gallery that severely restricts interacting with the image.
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_spectroscopy
Much more about this particular graph here: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-...
The deep field image says it's about 2.4 arcmin across[1], Stephan's Quintet image is about 7.4 arcmin across[2], etc.
[1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/035/01G... [2] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G...
The moon is between 29.4 and 33.5 arcminutes wide, depending on where it is in its orbit. So about a tenth of the width of the moon.
this is so much more digestible than "grain of sand at arm's length", and those two metrics dont feel at all equivalent -- the moon is not ten grains of sand at arm's length wide, right?
in either case, 1/10 the width of the moon is so much easier to comprehend. when is the last time anyone tried holding a grain of sand at arms length? what a weird comparison to make when everyone on earth already has a stable/familiar reference in the sky.
[1] https://astronomy.com/magazine/stephen-omeara/2010/01/stephe...
The moon is about half a degree or 30 arcminutes wide. This doesn't make sense but give it a try tonight if the moon is out.
FWIW many of the galaxies and nebula you see in astrophotography are actually bigger in the night sky than one might guess. Andromeda for example is about 6 times wider than the moon at ~3 degrees across - https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-rela...
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Super easy.
There are a few others to be found (I suspect image duration is much shorter than for the Deep Field).
Even as far-from-primary-interest-objects, amazing detail.
> https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7ETPF7DVBJAC42JR5N6EQRH.png
Is this for real?! It looks like it came right out of a Sci-Fi movie/book. Could anyone explain how much of this is post-editing magic?
Anyway, that looks like science fiction because science fiction borrowed that look from astronomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula
how does the scale of color shifting relate to the red-shift present in deep-field subject?
Idly wondering: are the furtherest objects being captured, so red-shifted, that the translation for human viewing done in these images more or less balances that out, so what we see in the translated images for some thickness of distance-bubble, is what we would see from a much closer perspective with the naked eye, akin to "true color." (I.e. so close that the relative red-shift would be insignificant...)
What you'd want to see specifically are the emission spectra showing absorption lines for well-known spectral bands. This shows specifically how red-shifted the light is, and is how red-shift was initially detected.
I doubt that there's an intentional mapping of red-shifted appearance + spectral sensitivity to near-and-unadjusted appearance. Though that might be possible.
In practice, I suspect the bands JWST is receiving don't map well to the RGB sensitivity of the human eye, but insteat JWST's sensitivity is tuned to scientific interests and value.
Almost all the light in this image is way off the red end of the human visual spectrum, of course. The shortest wavelength filter is F090W which has a center wavelength of 902nm, about the same color as the light coming out of a TV remote infrared LED, which is barely visible in pure darkness.
This is what it looks like through a film SLR, without the detail enhancing filters: http://www.phys.ttu.edu/~ozprof/3372f.htm Here's a 20 minute exposure through a telescope: http://www.phys.ttu.edu/~ozprof/3372fk.jpg Maybe what you would see with your own eyes through binoculars at a dark site well away from city lights. A dim red smudge, hints of finer detail.
The redshift on the other JWST images is because most of them are of objects that are much, much, much farther away. Infrared telescopes are great for observing those, but that's not the only thing they're used for.
A good way to see this is comparing it to Hubble [1], a lot of the extra detail you see is thanks to IR letting you see the stars behind.
What I was asking is: Is the target's normally-visible light redshifted into the same bands that JWST is measuring, higher? or lower frequency?
That doesn't have anything to do with why JWST uses IR.
NGC3372 is a cloud of (relatively) hot gas and dust. It's emitting broad spectrum blackbody radiation: it's emitting on all wavelengths. You can look at the same cloud at different wavelengths and see different things, telling you what parts of the cloud are at what temperature, or relative chemical composition, or what parts are ionized: http://legacy.spitzer.caltech.edu/uploaded_files/graphics/fu... Nothing here is redshifted, Spitzer is just capturing different light entirely.
In the side by side of JWST and Hubble https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXecm6vXwAMPhoc?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXecnp2XkAE4Rs5?format=jpg&name=... you see broadly the same thing, but Hubble is almost all visible-light while JWST goes deeper into infrared and sees cloud structure that Hubble doesn't.
The NIRCAM instrument on JWST has a wavelength range of about 600 - 5000nm [1]. The human eye is sensitive to around 380nm - 700nm.
To shift blue light (380nm) down to the upper frequency range of NIRCAM (600nm) requires a redshift of:
z = Δλ / λ0 = 0.58
This is related to the velocity of the object by:
z = v / c
and the velocity is related to distance (approximately) by the Hubble constant (H0 ~ 71 km/s / Mpc):
d = v/ H0
So we can rearrange and solve for distance to get:
d = z c / H0 = 8 billion light years.
The southern ring nebula is more like 2000 light years from us, so not even vaguely far enough that NIRCAM would see "originally-visible" light. The deep field image might actually be far enough... the faintest galaxies there might be something like 12 billion light years away [2].
[1] https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/instrumentation [2] https://www.nasa.gov/content/discoveries-hubbles-deep-fields
What causes this "smoke"?
In smokey or smoggy air, the red light is also scattered.
The "smoke" in a nebula is mostly gas and dust. It's either left-over primordeal matter (hydrogen gas, some helium), or ejecta from novas and supernovas --- star-smoke if you will, though it's created by nuclear fusion rather than chemical combustion.
JWST's IR sensors can cut through that dust more readily than Hubble's optical-range sensors could, and pull out more detail on the dust to boot (based on my own viewing of comparative images).
I'm not sure if the dust is reflecting light or glowing from heat, though my hunch is it's mostly reflecting. Stellar gas that gets hot enough will also glow in infrared (or higher) wavelengths, and that might also be picked up by JWST. I suspect there will be targets demonstrating this in future.
The coloring is usually done to indicate different temperatures or wavelengths detected, so it can be a bit misleading.
https://images.app.goo.gl/9gqtdbcsBxY6RonY9 https://images.app.goo.gl/pG7sfjLGU9nqmAvH7 https://images.app.goo.gl/JGebDZ7V5EamKoY89
i.e. If we were moving at the same velocity of the Nebula looking with our own eyes.
i.e. What it would look like "in real life if I actually went there"
But that's with a telescope and long exposure & image stacking. But still in RGB as humans would see it.
I guess there would be a point that if you were not so far away, but still far enough away - it would light up the sky. This is emission nebula after all.
BUt if you were in it, it would be so diffuse that you wouldn't know it... perhaps a weird glow if you were near some of the forming stars.
Not much weirder than looking at an X-ray image.
Also, there seem to be multiple layer-masks involved for specific regions and objects.
I get that you can shift and composite color, based on hue, apply filters etc, but: Photoshop?
Curious if anyone can explain, that what we see is actual science or some touched up version of objects in our universe.
p.s.: What struck me the most is the absence of noise, especially for the deep field photo. Hubble took many exposures over weeks, which normally would allow for reliable reduction of noise, webb took some shots over the course of hours and there’s hardly any noise to see. Weirdest part is seeing them just “healing brushing” away some dots - how is the decision process on altering images like that?
(edit for typos)
(And have been eagerly waiting for this moment for ages)
It just seems “unscientific” to just use Photoshop and above all curious about the set of rules and algorithms, that enables them to decide which hue to pick for which region, levels, etc.
This article goes through processing a Hubble image of one of the same objects that Webb did today and includes an example of what it looks like before adjusting for contrast and tone.
https://www.rocketstem.org/2015/04/20/how-astronomers-proces...
There's a bit on the data policy on wikipedia [1] but basically the operations costs are funded (in part) by people paying for telescope time. The project that is currently paying for the telescope gets exclusive access for a 1 year "embargo" period, after which the data becomes public.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Gro...
These color composite images really show off how awesome JWST is. They're meant for the public to enjoy (astronomers enjoy them too).
Photoshop can do just about anything with spatial image data and if it's not built-in, you can probably find a plug-in to do what you want or write a script. The trade-off is the software can be very complex because over the decades it's grown to support an incredible number of use cases.
Over the years I've also seen PS used in unexpected ways at work. If you need to do something programmatic to image or spatial data, PS is a good host platform for custom code because it will handle importing file formats, color space conversion, bit plane manipulation, alignment, scaling, cropping, perspective correction and masking before your custom processing and then it'll export the output in whatever sizes and formats you need. And it will do it on gigapixel data sets under script control. That's a lot of grunt work you don't have to implement. I've even seen it wired up to Matlab.
But when you have 10k x 5k pixel images and channels that don’t directly correlate with visual spectrum I don’t see why using photoshop extensively is wrong especially for images to be released to the general public. I’m even sure some local touch up is acceptable for me.
Kinda disappointing if it's really just a paint by numbers Photoshop to look nice
Anyway, this post shows an example comparing a "flat" color composite and one that's been tonemapped etc. This is using Hubble data but it's the same subject as one of the JWST images.
https://www.rocketstem.org/2015/04/20/how-astronomers-proces...
This video goes into some detail about the filters that were used for one of these JWST images:
If you would rather stare at an array of numbers or a non colorized version (black-and-white) it would be much harder to make out the various features.
So think of it as a visual aid, rather than an arts project or a way to falsify the data: the colorization is part of the science, specifically: how to present the data best.
Guess, that’s my main question.
I get that the aquired data needs to be transformed in a way so we get an image that depicts a reality we can visually process.
I honestly thought there’s some tools in Nasa’s imaging group that, based on scientific rules, pumps out an image that is correct - seeing Photoshop in use left me wonder…
I get that the investment needs to be “sold” too, would be sad though if we reached fashion-ad conduct for science…
And don’t get me wrong: I am in awe and more than happy this thing finally gets put to use.
Based on their distance, hence blue-/redshift, you could at least predict the visible colors we might perceive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsehead_Nebula
Maybe one or another of them is more "true to life" but since human eyes never evolved to view this stuff, there's no reason to think that the best and most informative view of an astronomical object is the visible light one.
If you use an optical telescope to look at the Orion Nebula, you'll see it, but it'll appear pretty much grey. (No scope and it'll be what looks like a bright star, with perhaps a little bit of a blobby nature.) Hook a standard SLR camera up to the telescope and do a long exposure, though, and the reds and blues become readily apparent.
Here's one I took with a standard camera and a 6" scope: https://www.instagram.com/p/CMtHMicBwvI/
If the Sun had been redder or bluer and your eyes were the size of your head or much smaller, everything would look very different.
The Webb images are infrared so "in real life" you'd never see them as shown here. You'd see whatever was visible in optical wavelengths.
This isn't just a quantitative difference. Those science fiction imagined alien worlds covered in little tiny technological lights - just like Earth - are a fantasy. Aliens might see UV instead of optical frequencies, and Earth would look like Venus to them - an opaque planet covered by a thick haze. They might light their spaces with UV, which we wouldn't be able to see so their planet would look dark to us.
And so on.
At this level 'distance' = 'time'.
The Carina Nebula (imaged) is 7,500 light years away. It is still there.
It seems like people are going through mental gymnastics to avoid answering the question. If someone asked what a famous black and white photo like raising the flag would look like in person, would people give the same nonsense answers? e.g. "There is no "in real life", "the past cant be seen"
For the Carina Nebula[2] :
"Several filters were used to sample narrow and broad wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F444W, Orange: F335M, Yellow: F470N, Green: F200W, Cyan: F187N, Blue: F090W"
This is in comparison to the human eye, which sees 630 nm for red, 532 nm for green, and 465 nm for blue light.
That is not to say the Nebula isn't also observable in visible light, you would just be seeing different colors and perhaps features. probably something like this visible spectrum imagine of a different part of the nebula
For the other images, what you would see in person ranges from very similar to nothing depending on the image, and pixel in the image.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Flag_on_Iwo_Jima
[2] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/031/01G...
They would look different, have different colors and features. Galaxies would look more like andromeda as viewed via telescope.
Although the accuracy of infrared, or other non-visible spectrum digital representations, could be disputed you would definitely see something similar in visible spectrum as compared to infrared, but with much more dust. Most objects that are emitting energy are doing so in many portions of the spectrum.
See this example: https://esahubble.org/images/heic1406c/
I think this is an old interpretation of the speed of light and spacetime, since it describes travelling very far through space and also time. So it's more of a statement about the realities of space travel than what it would be like to be there now.
As you said, distance = time, so saying that too much time has passed is the same as saying that it's too distant to see, which is kind of beside the point.
I would say that what we see in the pictures really is the nebula as it exists now, but if you tried to travel there at near the speed of light, your speed through time would increase so much that you would see it rapidly change.
The real question is, what would you see if you were there now (at the time during which the shape of the nebula matches the photo).
After some thought, I wonder if it is more an issue of neurodiversity. Perhaps some people cant imagine themselves viewing a celestial object, or can't imagine the desire to do so.
So I'm not sure where the sentiment that these are just images for the public is coming from. That's certainly part of why these observations were made and processed this way, but there is science too.
I don't think you're correct. PR images from telescopes aren't new, so if you are correct then surely you'll be able to find papers based on older photoshopped images from Hubble.
Are you able to find any?
Here is an example of color-coded images from Hubble being used - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/345911/pdf - The same beautiful image used to get the public excited about space is used in Fig2 to locate where helium, nitrogen, and oxygen are in a planetary nebula. Even the 'Pillars of Creation' image was used for this sort of analysis, though it was less interesting than most images.
"Beautiful" just happens to overlap with "highest contrast and most useful for study". JWST has more sensors than ever before, so it will be more colorful than ever before.
Since we can't visually process spectrums other than visible, there's no "correct" way to show the image.
For example, some algorithm might filter the raw images and extract objects matching some properties, fit them, and then run every reasonable manipulation of that filter to give the fit an error bar. Or they will compare spectra from many galaxies to understand their composition, again running every reasonable variation of the calculation to get some kind of uncertainty.
The end science result will be a graph of some kind in a paper, but it costs very little extra to make these beautiful images on the side.
I can't tell you because I wasn't looking over the shoulder of whoever made the image, but at a guess they started off from a black and white image, then turned it into an RGB image and change the various hues until relevant details became easier to see. The reason that that works is because a large scale structure has areas that emit at roughly the same intensity so you can bring these out by colorizing such a range with a gradient around a single hue.
This is not an automated process because a computer would not know what we humans find 'interesting structures', if you could put that into some form of definition then you might be able to automate the process in the same way that black-and-white images are automatically colorized (which works, but which is sometimes hilariously wrong).
As for the sausage, how it is made is interesting, how it tastes is from a PR perspective probably more interesting. And regardless you could argue that anything that differs from an utterly black square is 'not truthful'.
In that case you could render the image differently depending on how many millions of years in the past you were interested in.
I.e these used to be human “visible” on earth, but eventually their colors shifted beyond what we can perceive with our eyes.
It depends on the science of course, but generally the sausage is made with specialized software that produces contour plots with error bars and what-have-you. The actual calculations will be done using just numbers, fitting models to data without any pretty pictures at all.
This likely wouldn't have made #1 on HN without "pretty pictures" (this is what astronomers calls them). Photoshop is made for pretty pictures so it would be silly _not_ to use it. :)
This is not a criterion of high quality software.
I guess that scientists will also use specialized software for fine analysis, but it doesn't make Photoshop useless.
1. photoshop is really good at composing different (spectral) layers together. There is alternatives to this like pixinight that are more geared toward deep sky astronomy work but I'm sure it's easier to hire people that can just take a Photoshop class.
there are many layers/masks involved for different filters. the filters accept or reject certain wavelengths of light and may be designed for specific elements on the periodic table. people often talk about hydrogen filters or oxygen filters, sulfer filters etc. the color distinction you see is actually indicating elemental composition much of the time. I'm not sure what filters webb is using.
2. modern telescopes clean up their images by taking a "master dark frame" that is a stacked frame of many frames taken with the lens cap on. The goal there is to compute the noise profile of the sensor. I'm sure before launch the darks for the sensors were determined and are at the ready to correct and calibrate images coming from the telescope. think of it as applying a bespoke noise filter for that sensor. It's a fast process to apply it, but not to generate it. If they really make the raws available I'm sure we'll see more noise there.
3. the touch up you see them doing is the removal of a hot pixel which survived the calibration process with the dark frame. no doubt on space telescopes they still get errant hot pixel of some kind of particle or cosmic ray they don't want makes it to the sensor and flips a bit (and is therefore not account for in the master dark). happens all the time. they're probably keeping a map of where they're getting hot pixels.
Did you mean you thought they were adjusting the content and not just fixing noise?
Here's a mental model that I found particularly beneficial:
All electromagnetic radiation is the same. In the sense that every proton/neutron is the same. But adding a few more protons/neutrons creates an entirely new element, with entirely new chemical properties. From something simple come incredibly new powerful behaviours. So just as Iron is massively different from Plutonium, Microwaves are massively different from Gamma rays.
What we call "visible light" is not particularly special, except to us, and our specific human biology. It feels more real because it's visible to us, but it's not on the grand scale of the universe.
What we're observing through these telescopes isn't a dog chasing a ball. We're seeing stuff billions of light years away, millions of light years in size, billions of years ago. Passing by trillions of other stars and planets on the way.
These objects are emitting a gargantuan amount of information. Why should we only present the information that happens to be in the same subset as what our primitive primate vision cones can process?
So, no, if you were to teleport to the nebula/galaxy that we're showing images for, it wouldn't look exactly like that to your human eyes. Instead, what you're seeing is what a god with perfect vision of the universe would see. You're seeing the universe for what it is, not just the part of it that is presented to humans.
Here's the API to access the boring original data.
He said: A) there are two of them in the team doing the imaging B) it doesn’t start with an image - it’s literally heaps of binary data that the scientists stitch together C) he then does the colour overlay based on agreed norms (one colour per input frequency for consistency) D) most of his “touch up” work is getting the colour gradient right between the brightest and dimmer objects - without this a lot of resolution would be lost (brights too bright, or dim not visible).
Hope this helps…
Modern sensors are amazingly low noise. 10 years ago, I used to have to calibrate out darks, bias and flats just to remove my sensor noise. Now with modern CMOS sensors, people still do that but it isn't as necessary and you can overcome much of the sensor noise by capturing enough data - and that's where JWST just dominates. THere is nothing impeeding the data causing noise.
Shot noise is easily removed by integration, Read noise on modern sensors is almost non existent and easily calibrated out, dark current is extremely low, bias, hot and cold pixels are all things that can be removed with calibration and integration and with space telescopes cosmic rays are probably the most annoying thing but if you stack enough images they integrate right out.
But back to photoshop, the final images are just publishing art. I use pixinsight myself for all the heavy lifting, pixel math, integration and calibration but sometimes go out to photoshop for cleanup - especially for web/print.
Don't get me wrong, the images are amazing, but when small startups like Rocket Lab can have uninterrupted streams all the way to the orbit, but NASA stream from a studio looks more amateurish than your average 13-year-old Fortnite player on Twitch, it leaves a pretty bad impression.
People often underestimate how insanely hard it is to put something like this together, but I'm surprised NASA did, It's not like it's the first time NASA does a livecast.
Coming up with personal answers to this is the ultimate character resolve exercise!
It helps you relax and put things in perspective. For example, you can focus on achieving high scores just for the sake of it. Have the kids you want, have the life you want, have the things you want, knowing that it's pointless but that you want it and that's enough.
Does the cosmos care if I give my Mother a birthday present or not? Unlikely it does. Do I? Yes, I send one every year. Does it matter then? Not really, but I like doing it because I like being nice to my Mother.
The bathwater is the notion of a subjective cosmos, some overarching supreme being to whom specific events ought to matter somehow. I’m very happy to throw out that bathwater, along with other theocratic sophistries that still influence our thinking too much. The baby is meaning itself, all of which takes place within the cosmos, and every instance of which is subjectively experienced by some specific subject, by definition. And crucially, these subject–object connections can themselves be observed by third parties as real, objective phenomena through abundant evidence. They are as real as potatoes or sound waves.
This part of your comment feels like a non sequitur:
> Does it matter then? Not really
You just said it matters to you. Then you said it doesn’t ‘really’ matter because it doesn’t matter to…the cosmos as a whole? So what? It doesn’t matter to your toaster either, nor to my cat, but it still matters to you. For something to ‘matter’ there must be some particular object that matters to some particular subject, and in this case the subject is you. Your reason for doing it doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to you, it’s just an explanation of why it matters to you.
And to me, sure, those things matter. But I also acknowledge that this isn't an objective thing the cosmos put into the world but a personal feeling. My argument is essentially that you've got to do that. Acknowledge that what matters to you is something personal. And to cherish that because the journey is important. I see it as a pathway to positive nihilism.
“Everything as a whole does not matter” or “there is no single ultimate purpose to everything as a whole” are more valid claims, but tautological. Something can only matter to some subject by definition, and ‘everything’ is a magic word that includes every thing, so it can’t matter to anything else, by definition, because there is no thing outside everything to which it could matter. This tautology is not well summarised as “nothing matters”.
I used to take solace in the “nothing matters” notion from nihilism, but I now think it’s a false and dangerous comfort. 1) it’s straight up disprovable with a few seconds’ analysis – really just a motivated twisting of the above tautology into something quasi-profound, and 2) it’s burying your head in the sand – it’s avoidant wordplay that will eventually fail you, engendering a dull feeling of narcissistic loneliness over time. I now think it’s better to recognise that each case of something ‘mattering’ requires both an object and a subject. That subject isn’t always you, but you might as well start with the cases where you are the subject. You can notice things that matter to you (just basics like pain, pleasure), and that they do indeed matter to you. Then you can consider that there are other minds, and realise that what matters to them isn’t the same as what matters to you - but the fact that things do matter to them may itself matter to you, and so on and on. Once you start looking for meaning you realise the universe is absolutely teeming with it. Just an unfathomable number of connections of meaning between subjects and objects. In human society there is a combinatorial explosion of matterings.
Life is indeed a cool trip, an adventure, but only so because it is so full of events that absolutely fucking matter along the way. And yes, then you die. That doesn’t mean none of it mattered to you, and it doesn’t mean none of what you did mattered to anyone else. These are just logical errors.
You might think I’m just being pedantic. But I think it’s a very important distinction. “Nothing matters” is not just pedantically different from “There isn’t one single universal reason for everything as a whole”, it’s completely different in its implications. The former is an oversimplification that causes a lot of unnecessary feelings of bleakness, and probably causes a lot of indirect social harm by drawing excellent minds into inaction, springing from a platitude we tell ourselves when things get too much and then repeat as a kind of sad-mantra. The latter correctly reveals itself as tautological wordplay that we may discard as meaningless.
consciousness is a hell of a drug
edit: Seems to be called the overview effect [0]
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10159217085846758&se...
https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/
(If you're on mobile, you should be able to zoom in and still use the slider)
Edit: btw you should add the ability to zoom on desktop too. Would make it a lot easier to see the massive difference between the two
I'm hoping that in the future we see pictures of locations and environments that are mind-blowing to the average person who loves space.
JWST can thus observe much fainter and much more distant objects - galaxies billions of years old, exoplanets, etc., and it can do more of it.
To most people, ants are just an annoying bug. But to scientists (and curious non-scientists), ants are endlessly fascinating creatures. Together with scientists who speak to "common folk", even they can understand the beauty in how ants work.
That's why outreach and education is so important. And sometimes the beauty doesn't come from the direct thing (like these images, although I'd argue they are beautiful by themselves too) but from the indirect implication of the thing (time to acquire the picture, the data gathered to "draw" the picture, the community for even enabling this picture from being drawn and so on).
- Carina Nebulae: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/vxengq/carina_nebula...
- Southern Ring Nebulae: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/vxfdva/hastily_throw...
The new ones make the old ones look blurry and dull!
For this image, Hubble only had 1.7 hours of exposure while JWST had 12.5 hours.
More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32074989
The same by the 2022 version: 3.14159265358979323846 in a few milliseconds.
Both the speed of the computation and the resolution of the result are what makes it impressive, not the fact that the nature of the universe does not change fundamentally when viewed across a longer span of time.
It is mind-blowing, but maybe not to the 'average person who loves space'. But if you stop for a bit longer to understand what it took to create that image and what it is that you are actually looking at (the age of the objects involved, their apparent size and the resolving power and temperature of the telescope required to make it) it becomes a lot more impressive.
To me, the real 'shock and awe' will be when scientific papers are published which reveal new knowledge and deeper understanding of our universe. This will take some time although I'm sure the first papers are already racing toward pre-print.
> Hubble telescope was funded and built in the 1970s by the United States space agency NASA with contributions from the European Space Agency. Its intended launch was 1983, but the project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the 1986 Challenger disaster. Hubble was finally launched in 1990.
Of course they went for an easy gas giant target first (it has lots of water, which is great), but those Earth-like planets in the Goldilocks zone are gonna be some of the most exciting stuff that comes out of this. Looking forward to it.
Really, they should be already building 2nd James Webb. I am sure even 10 of them would get 100% utilization for their whole lifetime. I can only imagine what kind of needless political game is happening around prioritization of time slots for it.
Or start working on next-gen, bigger, more resilient etc. It costs peanuts compared to any significant CERN upgrade and we have so much room to progress in astronomy (aka understanding our home, this universe) just by getting more data and resolution.
Super happy we have one JWST, and I hope fervently that it will outlast its original mission by a large fraction, every sign right now points in that direction.
I like to point out that Microsoft could have paid for seven JWSTs (development costs and all) with what they paid for one Activision.
An obvious target for the coronagraph for regular imaging, but there's no way to get a transmission spectrum of its atmosphere.
The real problem is that Prox c. b is only 0.04 AU out from its host star. So the absorption spectra for a star lined up with the planet is going to be pretty well contaminated with light from Prox c. You could imagine various schemes for moving around the observer for the best angle or big occultation disks, but at a certain point it's going to be easier to just fly a probe over and sample the atmosphere directly.
"Over the coming year, researchers will use spectroscopy to analyze the surfaces and atmospheres of several dozen exoplanets, from small rocky planets to gas- and ice-rich giants. Nearly one-quarter of Webb’s Cycle 1 observation time is allocated to studying exoplanets and the materials that form them." - https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-...
Hubble shows four spikes because it has two struts.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/
https://www.universetoday.com/155062/wondering-about-the-6-r...
The article is very informative, but my read of it is different: the three major "spikes" are in fact due to the hexagonal shape of the mirrors and how they're laid out. The struts also add three spikes, but: two of them coincide with the mirror spikes, while one of them (from the vertical strut) is visible on its own, and causes the smaller perfectly horizontal spike.
The image I'm basing this on is in your article with a caption starting from "The point spread function for the James Webb Space Telescope" [1]
[1]: https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FOFC8ZPX0AIB...
Though I suppose now that I think of it, it's possible the main mirror assembly actually has no built in roll control but only pitch, since the yaw part could be done by moving the entire telescope while remaining shaded. I've never seen any videos showing the full movement, but the previews for LUVIOR show it having full 3 degree articulation relative to the heatsink segment, so I assumed the Webb also has it given that they're extremely similar designs.
It's in an orbit around L2, so it's not statically positioned in space. L2 also moves with the earth around the Sun, so it's not statically limited to any one region of the sky.
The images take on a more synthetic and fake quality when the technical physical man-made constraints of our telescope get projected out onto the natural very much NON-man-made universe.
Look at https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7ETPF7DVBJAC42JR5N6EQRH.png and observe the incredible entropy in the nebula itself. The consistent, perfect, straight lines, of each star are jarring in the image.
but we should edit them :)
https://hitran.org/ free after registration
https://hitran.org/media/refs/HITRAN-2020.pdf
HAPI (programming interface manual) https://hitran.org/static/hapi/hapi_manual.pdf
Youtube tutorials https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiKuigtFahk&list=PLqOG3cBizT...
It is very easy to use and might help to understand WASP-96 b transmission spectrum. https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7NBXDHYYSVBP2M476PRGG3A.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_...
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G...
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G...
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/035/01G...
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G...
I've been interested in astronomy since I learned to read, and JWST has been planned for most of my life(all but 2 years if you count all explorations of ideas for a post-hubble telescope since about 95). I've been waiting for this my whole life, so this feels like a strangely personal event to me even though I had nothing to do with it myself. It's so hard to even put into words the tremendousness of this technological and scientific achievement, so I won't try.
Anyway, enough sap.
I'm super stoked that they've already started taking spectra of exoplanets. This one was sort of an "easier" one but the detail was unprecedented as with all the other observations. I can't wait to see some results on some of these smaller rocky planets in their star's "goldilocks zone".
These are the planets that have simply been out of reach until now, and are the most interesting in terms of searching for signs of life.
1. Looking at the light from the tiny red-shifted galaxies that are ~13 billion years old... would the Milky Way appear the same to an observer ~13 billion ly from us?
2. What is the cause of the star pointed artifacts (specifically, having 6 major "points") for particularly bright objects? If you zoom in closely on any one of the points, you can almost make out a hex grid, as if the shape of the telescope's mirrors is the cause. Is that correct?
2. Yes the artifact shape is related to the mirror shape, and the support arms which block some light. this is called a Diffraction spike. There are a bunch of fake web telescope image videos on YouTube with 4pointed diffraction spikes so you can tell they are taken from a different telescope.
on 2., you are seeing Diffraction Spikes[0] which are artefacts of the telescope's design.
But everything humans find important are only that due to human and sociological constructs, whether calendrical or cosmological. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. The unthinking matter of nature is utterly indifferent (as far as we know or think).
– someone who drove a long, long way to see the same solar eclipse, no regrets!
Is infrared the only (or the most convenient, most useful etc) spectrum visible given the great distance? If we could get close enough, I suppose we would see things in clearer visible light. Without any enhancements, long exposures etc, would they be anywhere as colorful as the nebula images? Would they be visible to us at all, or are the emissions too weak even up close to make any impression to our eyes?
As you may be aware, all digital images are composed of a color palette applied to monochrome images, it just so happens that we usually pick a color palette of red, green, and blue, which ideally correspond as closely as possible to the three wavelengths of light to which the imaging sensors in our cameras (and also our eyes) are sensitive, thus reproducing what our eyes would see in person.
In the case of JWST, mid- and far-infrared sensors were chosen for several reasons, the first being that due to the accelerating expansion of the universe, light from further away (equivalently, light from further back in time) has been stretched out along its path of travel, causing its wavelength to be shifted further into the infrared spectrum. Another possible reason is that infrared wavelengths penetrate the interstellar dust clouds much better than visible or ultraviolet light, allowing us to see stars and galaxies that were previously hidden by dust.
Since JWST captures wavelengths of light that we can't see, we have to apply some sort of visible-light palette to the monochrome images it sends back. At the bottom of this image, you can see which wavelengths were mapped to which visible-light colors: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7N9A6934R1WRWBJY1ZXB98B.png One key aspect of this mapping is that the order of wavelengths has been preserved; shorter IR wavelengths are colored blue while longer ones are colored red. It's likely that this mapping is non-linear though, so the relative distances between IR wavelengths are not the same as the distances between the hues in the image, and this mapping was chosen to maximize the visible detail in the resulting image, as well as to highlight scientifically relevant information such as dust clouds and areas of star formation, so it's not totally arbitrary.
In addition, the dynamic range of JWST is much much larger than the pixels in any display. The raw data values probably range from 0 to some hundreds of thousands, while your display's pixel brightness can only go from 0 to 255 (or maybe 1023, if you have a 10-bit HDR display). While we could simply map the maximum pixel value to 255 and compress everything else in between, this would lose nearly all of the detail present in the darker regions of the images, compressing them to 0. Instead, a non-linear brightness mapping is applied, to best represent all the information present in darker regions without blowing out the bright stars and galaxies.
So to answer your questions, the colors shown in the images are not what you would see in person. Without any enhancements you probably wouldn't be able to see much if any of the dust clouds, and many of the redder galaxies would not be visible to you at all, while all the rest would be different hues than the ones shown (probably mostly whites, yellows, and reds).
The galaxies from the early universe would not be visible in the visible spectrum since due to red shift, its become infrared spectrum. Also infrared spectrum can see through stellar dust so some things become more transparent in the photos.
James Webb Telescope First Images – Livestream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070531 - July 2022 (8 comments)
Deepest infrared image of universe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062849 - July 2022 (334 comments)
James Webb Space Telescope White House Briefing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139 - July 2022 (91 comments)
The science performance report of JWST is a fascinating read. Some of the highlights that sent me down a rabbit-hole
- On Predicted lifetime of consumables - Before launch, JWST was required to carry propellant for at least 10.5 years of mission lifetime. Now that JWST is in orbit around L2, it is clear that the remaining propellant will last for more than 20 years of mission lifetime.
- On Orbit - Orbit around L2 is maintained through regular station-keeping burns, which are scheduled every three weeks
- On observatory lifetime - At present, the largest source of uncertainty is long term effects of micrometeoroid impacts that slowly degrade the primary mirror.
- On Other spacecraft performance - JWST is now generating 1.5 kW to match the power load, with a capability of > 2 kW
- On Fault management - Of the 344 single point failures at launch, almost all of them related to deployments, only 49 remain; these are common to most science missions (for example, only one set of propellant tanks, only one high gain antenna)
The section on "Pointing and guiding" which mentions how complex sub-systems interact to achieve "line-of-sight stabilization" and how its not possible to test those systems together in an end-to-end fashion on the ground is interesting.
Are these images as received, or are they frequency shifted post processed into the visible range?
Note that the "colors" used in that graphic are also false, since only F070W and F090W are in the human eyeball's passband.
Why am I so stupid but isn’t this the obvious thing to do?
Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exoplane...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beta_Pictoris_b_in_Motion...
When Hubble looked at Pluto, it was a low-detail blur ("The Hubble raw images are a few pixels wide"), and that's within our solar system. https://esahubble.org/images/opo1006h/
Remember, the first exoplanet was detected in 1992, and not by imaging; prior to that we didn't even know if they existed at all. JWST's planning started in 1996.
Another neat idea is to use the Sun as a gravitational lens. But you you would need it put it way past Pluto to get proper focus. So maybe another hundred years to get tech and resources to that point.
https://calculator.academy/diffraction-limit-calculator/#f1p...
However gravity can bend light so there is some thought of using the sun as a lens. However the observation would have to be pretty far away from our sun so its just wishful thinking in our lifetime.
https://www.freethink.com/space/gravity-telescope
For now the best we will have to see a dot on image via coronagraphy and maybe understand more about the exoplanet through spectroscopy.
Like, here’s what we could see at this point in space before. Now we can see… THIS!
You could call those lens flares I guess, but commonly known as diffraction spikes when it comes to telescopes. In this case they appear because of the supporting struts in the James Webb telescope.
Choosing a limited palette in order to save bytes, some might say is compression. If said compression hurts the image quality, some might call that "compression artifacts".
The point stands, GIF was a poor choice for the format here.
The photon collectors on JWT detect infra red which is not visible to humans.
And yes, sometimes the mapping is done to make things look nice.
All electromagnetic radiation is the same. In the sense that every proton/neutron is the same. But adding a few more protons/neutrons creates an entirely new element, with entirely new chemical properties. From something simple come incredibly new powerful behaviours. So just as Iron is massively different from Plutonium, Microwaves are massively different from Gamma rays.
What we call "colors", or "visible light" is not particularly special, except to us, and our specific human biology. It feels more real because it's visible to us, but it's not on the grand scale of the universe.
What we're observing through these telescopes isn't a dog chasing a ball. We're seeing stuff billions of light years away, millions of light years in size, billions of years ago. Passing by trillions of other stars and planets on the way.
These objects are emitting a gargantuan amount of information. Why should we only present the information that happens to be in the same subset as what our primitive primate vision cones can process?
So, no, if you were to teleport to the nebula/galaxy that we're showing images for, it wouldn't look exactly like that to your human eyes. Instead, what you're seeing is what a god with perfect vision of the universe would see. You're seeing the universe for what it is, not just the part of it that is presented to humans.
Parent just wants to see some cool images from Earth's latest and greatest space telescope, preferably in a convenient way.
Astrophysicists from NASA, ESA, et al. are hanging off the data and details from every last photon collected - each one having traveled billions of years from their origin deep in the past of our universe.
With every point of light in the images, the instruments on Webb and associated computer analysis here on earth analyze each facet of the spectra, inferring the chemical composition of galaxies we may have never even seen before as a species - calculating how much spacetime expanded in the long and lonely journey of those photons hurtling through our universe for billions of years, path bent by warping gravity fields, colliding and remitting from galactic dust to finally arrive at a superchilled mirror segment more than a million miles from earth.
But hey, can we just get a scrollable feed of these in a web-optimized image format?
[ edit: I guess it wasn't clear -- I genuinely love the question. I'm not being sarcastic. YES obviously people want to look at the images and get excited from press release - YES obviously scientists are using a different data stream and not the press release site. What's really cool is that the same origin (12.5 hours of observing a tiny spec of sky) can be used for both. And genuinely the absurd dichotomy is funny, and cool. I guess there's so much sneering elitism on HN that it's easy to get lumped into the same boat. ]
If it's the pretty pictures that gets people interested, then show them the pretty pictures. We all paid for it, so let us see them.
Even within research projects we wish to find well organised datsets.
Asking about scrollable images seems to be a fair question to me, especially in the context of a press release.
> In a dream come true for exoplaneteers, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has demonstrated its unprecedented ability to analyze the atmosphere of a planet more than 1,000 light-years away. With the combined forces of its 270-square-foot mirror, precision spectrographs, and sensitive detectors, Webb has – in a single observation – revealed the unambiguous signature of water, indications of haze, and evidence for clouds that were thought not to exist based on prior observations. The transmission spectrum of the hot gas giant WASP-96 b, made using Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, provides just a glimpse into the brilliant future of exoplanet research with Webb.
and later:
> WASP-96 b is one of more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way. Located roughly 1,150 light-years away in the southern-sky constellation Phoenix, it represents a type of gas giant that has no direct analog in our solar system. With a mass less than half that of Jupiter and a diameter 1.2 times greater, WASP-96 b is much puffier than any planet orbiting our Sun. And with a temperature greater than 1000°F, it is significantly hotter. WASP-96 b orbits extremely close to its Sun-like star, just one-ninth of the distance between Mercury and the Sun, completing one circuit every 3½ Earth-days.
Download: 80MP/140MB https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5...
1.4GP/2.5GB (note: not every image viewer can handle a file this big) https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...
(Phil mosbey is the astro-photographer who made the hex print of JWT which nasa bought and placed in lobby (if you havent seen his space calandar, its amazing.)
he grew up with my younger brother, and I have some art/prints in my house of his.
-
Although, I agree with some other folks ; Why cant we point Hubble or JWT at the planets in our solar system, or the closest objects to us.
The deep-field view of both hubble and JWT are wonderful, but whats the diff on pointing it to closer objects.
--
Further, /noStupidQuestions: Why at out level of tech and the fact that all of these projects are funded by tax money (as a portion) can we not have live streaming (even if high latency) from all such projects?
What is the national security preventing us from having a space (or any other) telescope funded by public taxes from having the ability to see what it sees, even if with reasonable delay...
Wouldn't it be interesting to bounty analysis from such ;
Basically, allow for arm-chair amateur space-folks-ham-radio-style to do submit findings for bounties on discoveries?
Gathered the summary from the Royal Observatory’s website[1] regarding Hubble's major contributions
" - Helped pin down the age for the universe now known to be 13.8 billion years, roughly three times the age of Earth.
- Discovered two moons of Pluto, Nix and Hydra.
- Helped determine the rate at which the universe is expanding.
- Discovered that nearly every major galaxy is anchored by a black hole at the centre.
- Created a 3-D map of dark matter."
What's resonating with me today: As a web dev, I cannot imagine the feeling of so much dedication and effort from so many people finally unfolding to release after 30 years. One moonshot longer than full careers. Some of those responsible (hundreds? thousands?) retired or no longer with us. What a sacrifice, and what an achievement.
From what I can tell it takes anywhere from 5 (if you know what you're doing) to 10 clicks (once you understand the UI) to find all the links for a -singular- image.
Thanks nonetheless.
https://webbtelescope.org/news/news-releases?Collection=Firs...
1. Pick subject 2. Pick image which interests you (bottom) 3. Pick resolution you need (left sidebar)
Less flippantly, the number of galaxies in the images is just mind boggling. I'm looking forward to seeing 3d explorable map of the galaxies someday. I know it will happen if it hasn't already.
The telescope takes pictures in a different frequency band, like an infrared camera. These pictures are then color mapped to blue, green yellow and other colors that you normally see because just black and white image are boring to look at.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/033/01G...
> MIRI: Full Res, 1306 X 1133, TIF (1.78 MB) [1]
> NIR Cam: Full Res, 4833 X 4501, TIF (24.06 MB) [2]
Maybe it's a mistake, they suggest it should offer an "incredible amount of detail":
This Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) image also offers an _incredible amount of detail_, including a cache of distant galaxies in the background.
[2] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/033/01G...
Those two factors mean that it has fewer pixels per image.
Think of a reduction to extremes: if you have a sensor that is a centimeter square and you're trying to 'catch' a wave that is a meter long there is a fair chance the sensor will be bypassed entirely, but if you are trying to catch millimeter waves your sensor will be easily able to capture the photons.
The most practical example of this effect is the size of radio antennae, they get longer as the wavelength gets longer.
This was an image of a relatively "empty" portion of sky (no stars nearby), so anything you can see has to be pretty bright by itself, which means galaxy, not star.
Low res pictures on announcement day
fire this web dev
If this is low res then what is high res?
If you look only at the picture, it's gonna be hard to tell versus, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field#/media/File:... for the deep-field shot or https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2007/16/2099-Im... for the Carina Nebula shot.
If you read the details, the fact that JWST can resolve much dimmer light sources much more quickly than Hubble ever had a hope of should be fairly compelling from a "how much science can we do?" standpoint.
None of these images really stretch the legs of the instrument either. A hot jupiter is not an interesting exoplanet. It's a taste.
What exactly were you expecting from them?
I ment more in the context of images taken by Hubble telescope - you know, all the hype. 25 years of work, 40mln hours worked, billions spent. Pictures are better than hubbles, but not by orders of magnitude, which is what I expected. That's why underwhelming.
Things like looking for IR spectra of water vapor in the atmosphere of planets outside of our solar system we can't even do from earth, since our own atmosphere is not transparent at those wavelengths due to the water in it. (ditto for oxygen).
A thing they mentioned in the presentation today but mostly only in passing, was that images like that deep field image were captured with only something like a dozen hours of data collection and had better resolution and much better SNR and many more far redshift objects visible at all than an image of the same scene that took Hubble weeks of data collection to make.