How the Webb sends its hundred-megapixel images a million miles back to Earth

But why all was calling it (before the release) “the first picture of space in colors”? It isn’t captured with colors, it’s captured with infrared like all the space photos, then “colored”, as he said:

> Now, our eyes and brains have pretty good dynamic range, but this blows them out of the water — and more importantly, there’s no real way to show it. “It basically looks like a black image with some white specks in it, because there’s such a huge dynamic range,” said DePasquale. “We have to do something called stretch the data, and that is to take the pixel values and sort of reposition them, basically, so that you can see all the detail that’s there.”

Before you object in any way, first, be it known that this is basically how all imagery is created — a selection of the spectrum is cut out and adapted for viewing by our very capable but also limited visual system. Because we can’t see in infrared and there’s no equivalent of red, blue and green up in those frequencies, the image analysts have to do complicated work that combines objective use of the data to subjective understanding of perception and indeed beauty. Colors may correspond to wavelengths in a similar order, or perhaps be divided up to more logically highlight regions that “look” similar but put out wildly different radiation.