NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation | Hacker News Reader

NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation

nasa.gov

727 pointspizza191 comments

I compressed the full PNG via Guetzli (Google's high-quality jpg compressor) which took a couple of hours (now 15MB at 84% quality), so here it is:

https://github.com/dvasdekis/images/raw/master/pillars.jpg and https://mega.nz/file/BTdWSb6b#NHK9lAtGMIr1UxabLiC174ZvJWo7KS... and https://www.mediafire.com/file/n0qjxogsp203z0w/pillars.jpg/f...

The original crashed Windows when set as desktop background, but this one works.

Gorgeous, thank you for sharing

> so here it is

you posted 3, are there any differences or just different URLs?

and thanks!

Just different urls in case they get bandwidth limited

That image has some amount of artifacting around all the stars so I wouldn't advise you to use it. You'll get a lot more quality out of the image just downrezzing and then saving it with a higher jpeg quality setting.

Also I'm not sure why Google would take hours to find a jpeg quality setting. That's a really trivial thing and should only take seconds on a desktop with something like imagemagick.

If you have a faster machine it works no problem to just view it directly: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GFNMZESKZKXBMWGER9E0Z19G.png

Downloaded in less than 30 seconds and firefox handled viewing/panning/scaling it without issue. On an M1 Macbook Air.

> Also I'm not sure why Google would take hours to find a jpeg quality setting.

That's not what they're doing at all. It's optimising the encoding step to produce smaller files at a given quality setting.

> The original crashed Windows when set as desktop background, but this one works.

It's better to scale it down to the display resolution instead if that's what you want to use it for.

I have 2x 4K monitors, one vertical, so Windows turns most 4K images into a blurry mess as it tries to fit them widthwise and lengthwise.

This, on the other hand, still looks stunning.

Anyone else noticing the fairly common circularish structures in the top left of the image? It's like an uncanny number of stars are placed in circular arrangements. Is this due to some gravitational lensing effects around some of the objects in that area (some of which are visible)?

I'm not sure I see what you're describing, but it's unlikely to be gravitational lensing. That requires truly massive gravitational fields and distances to have a noticable effect (eg. large clusters of galaxies).

It's probably more likely due to gravity causing stars/dust to drift towards each other, causing clumps and voids.

thx.

Because your links are noscript/basic (x)html browsers friendly... nasa one... not so much...

I'd just like to say I appreciate you for providing a diverse selection of file lockers. Thank you fair stranger.

Thank you.

Also look at the comparison to the Hubble image.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/st...

Impressive to see the infrared spectrum seeing through all the background gas to the millions of stars.

Handy Dandy Slider action between the two!

https://esawebb.org/images/comparisons/weic2216/

Technically the comparison is not totally fair, that Hubble image was taken in visible light, while Webb's in infrared. Dust blocks visible light stronger, so background stars are effectively hidden from Hubble, but not from Webb. Here [1] you can see same field in visible and close infrared taken by Hubble. Webb of course shines in all the fine details and faint stars number.

[1] https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/screen/heic15...

I think the comparison is (rightly) meant to highlight the different imaging capabilities of the two telescopes.

But if the hubble can take an infrared picture, that would be a better comparison point, no?

Webb observes "much further" into the IR [1].

1. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/hu... (this image is from [2])

2. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-vs-webb-on-the-s...

JWST is undeniably a superior and remarkable instrument, but there has been a bit of a trend I have noticed on social media - and this may just be my perception rather than reality - of comparing it with suboptimal alternatives rather than the best image we had prior to the JWST, often making the new images look dramatically better when in fact the improvements to the best images we already had are more subtle (perhaps because they are particularly subtle on low res article thumbnails and mobile devices?)

I doubt it's anything nefarious. I think it's due to choosing comparisons based on popularity vs content.

Hubble's visible light Pillars of Creation image, for example, is super famous and instantly recognizable, but I'm not sure I would have known what I was looking at if the infrared version was used.

Also, different devices rarely have exactly the same usage and specifications. For example, Webb and Hubble have very different wavelength sensitivities, and this has tradeoffs in resolution and quality. In other words, the subjective image quality you get from the pictures may not tell the whole story of how valuable the data itself is.

Well some of that is because JWST's images are actually lower resolution than Hubble in many cases (depending on the wavelength). Though at wavelengths they both operate in, Webb's will of course be much higher resolution.

Does this mean what Hubble sees is actually closer to what I'd see with my own eyes than Hubble, or Hubble's version is closer?

yes, hubble's image is closer to what you could see with your eyes, since we also (mostly) sensitive to visible light. the zoom magnification is different, though, of course.

Not really. These scientific images are pretty much always remappings of arbitrary frequencies into RGB.

Hubble can take images similar to what you see, but the famous pillars of creation image is not an example of that.

That in image in "Hubble pallet" or SHO. It's an image where the colors come from three extremely narrow spectral bands that have better contrast in astronomical images because they show ionized gasses with less noise from dust reflected blackblody light.

Red=sulphur line, Green=Hydrogen line Blue=oxygen line.

The oxygen line appear blue-green to the human eye, and the Hydrogen alpha line is a dim far red color that the eye isn't very sensitive to, the sulphur line is even further towards the infrared, barely visible at all.

Ignoring magnification and only considering visible light, Hubble imagery is a colorized version of what you could see if you could stare at an object for hours at a time while accumulating every photon during that time at a 0Hz refresh rate into a single image rather than just seeing new faint photons at a constant refresh rate.

Is it possible to visualize how a human eye would see Pillars of Creation in real time? This always confused me with Hubble’s colorized photos.

Scientists are unconcerned with that question. Your eye is nothing like the Hubble. Your eye isn't that useful for doing science. Hubble images are.

The question wasn’t about scientists concerns.

Well, eyes are actually very useful for doing science, I think.

Here's a stacked series of exposures adding up to 36 minutes of the Eagle nebula (of which Pillars of Creation is a zoomed in segment) https://noctilove.co.uk/portfolio/m16-eagle-nebula/

About what you'd see from a 16 inch telescope in a superb dark sky location. A red smudge with hints of finer detail.

Thank you. If I was in a spaceship at a much closer distance to the object than I am right now, would I be able to see the dust and the shape similar to what we see on the photos? Or is this all invisible to the human eye?

Sure. It's a physical object, reflecting broadband light from nearby stars. The colors would be different, and you might not see the same fine structure without filters, like how the Sun looks very different through a Calcium K line filter https://thelonelyphoton.com/2022/01/08/solar-imaging/

Given its size the density is probably pretty low, though. If you got right up next to it you wouldn't see much, in the same way a fog bank gets less visible when you walk towards it.

Thank you - your explanation and that photo of the Sun with the Calcium K filter are very helpful.

With so many colorized photos of space objects and so many artist impressions, I wasn’t sure whether space is just a black void to the human eye or we are capable of seeing the gorgeous colors of different nebulae and such.

Yes, just open you favorite paint program, create a new image, select black color, select the fill tool, and click into the image.

We don't spend oodles of money to build sensitive instruments to observe things you could see with the unaided eye.

Take the colorized image to B&W, and that would be closer to what the human eye could see.

If you've ever been to a dark sky location so that you could see the Milky Way, then that's about what you'd see. Our eyes just are not sensitive enough to pick out colors. Even in a telescope, viewing objects like Orion's Nebula, which is incredibly bright, it is just B&W in the eye piece. Viewing Andromeda galaxy is also just B&W.

Depends on when you would see it. Because of inflation the color of things far away is shifting to longer wavelengths so they become invisible later in the timeline of the universe (invisible to humans).

The subject of this particular image is part of the Eagle Nebula in our own galaxy. So it's near enough to be gravitationally bound and not subject to the redshift of cosmic inflation.

Is it possible to calculate how much redshift it has had relative to us from the beginning (or at any point?)?

I think my point is that because the nebula is in our own galaxy, its motion relative to Earth would be dominated by the orbital motions of the two bodies (insofar as one can consider a whole nebula a "body"). So any Doppler shift of the light traveling from the nebula to Earth would be redshifted as the galactocentric orbits of the two bodies carried them away from each other, but blueshifted as the orbits carried them towards each other.

Which is a roundabout way of also saying: the nebula and Earth are in a gravitaionally bound system (the Milky Way) where gravity overpowers whatever it is that's causing cosmic inflation. So even if their orbital motions result in a redshift as currently viewed from Earth, the amount of redshift contributed by inflation (if any) is undetectable.

That said, if you know the orbits of two bodies, and can predict their motion relative to one another, you could calculate the expected red or blue shift, as viewed from one of those bodies, at any point in their orbits. :)

Edit: missing words

Depends on what you mean by "with my own eyes".

There is no way you could see this with your own eyes, there's no vantage point you can "stand on" to see the pillars - you'd either be too far away to see anything, or if you moved close enough so your eyes could actually focus on something, you'd be "inside" it, meaning you would see one star at most.

>Webb’s deeper infrared vision (0.6 microns to 28.5 microns)

That's true for the entire observatory, but this particular image was captured with NIRCAM, the near-infrared instrument, which goes out to 5 microns. Deep infrared is done with MIRI, a lower resolution instrument. (As required by the Abbe diffraction law)

Both can be true. Maybe an analogy would be a car vs truck, or photo camera vs video camera. They’re the same things but provide different value.

Now I am intrigued, the infrared image from Hubble seems to be able to see through even more clouds than JWST! What gives?

Put another way: jwst sees both the clouds and (many of) the stars, while Hubble seems to have been able to see one or the other more clearly at a time.

You could infer from that that the thing jwst is doing better is having a much greater range of spectrum available to it at a time (though I don't actually know if that's correct).

The JWST and Hubble have multiple cameras. The Hubble IR image is likely just the IR camera while the JWST is likely a composite of multiple cameras.

(This is purely speculation.)

Fair? This is exactly why they are not the same type of telescope only Biggie Sized. Seeing these comparisons is the point. "Here's visible light, and now here's what's hiding behind the visible dust" should be the tag to everyone of these kinds of comparisons

*it's not so much that isn't fair, just that they show different things but the problems is that it is not explained

The fact that the tiniest features of the cloud appear preserved between the two images gives an appreciation for how big it is. The two photos are taken 27 years apart

I'm more surprised by how much change there is. All the bluish stars in the JWT version are also in the Hubble version, but none of the yellowish. Is that parallax movement or are they obscured by the medium mentioned in the article? ("no galaxies")

That's dust. JWST uses infra-red because it can see through dust.

The bluest ones in the JWST images are the higest frequency (shortest wavelength) it can see. These are the longest frequencies hubble can see, so they look reddish.

Anything in JWST that is lower frequency (yellow to red) will not be visible to Hubble

It will be fascinating to see what other objects hubble captured over the years look like in higher definition

The hubble image looks much more aesthetically pleasing, even though it clearly has less detail.

Actually Webb has marginally less resolution than Hubble. Even though Webb is significantly larger the wavelength used is significantly longer resulting in a resolution that is approximately half that of Hubble.

Of course the electronics are better so some of the image capturing is better but the resolution is not.

I would like to see Webb’s photo without so much lens flare on individual stars (not sure if that’s the right term). Just kind of toned down stars but the same level of detail.

I think they’re millions of galaxies, which is even more amazing

The YouTube link [1] states that most of these are in fact stars. The gas from the nebula obscures the distant galaxies we're used to seeing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1__KBHIo_xs

Thanks for the correction. I was thinking of images similar to the Hubble Deep Field in which there are an unimaginable number of galaxies.

Funny enough, if you showed someone these two images without additional context, I'd wager the majority would think that the left one was taken by a modern telescope in 2022 and the right one from an older one decades ago.

The right one makes me think of a cheesy 70's sci-fi paperback. The discrepancy reminds me of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy:

“But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now-now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.”

― C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

While stars, planets and other astronomical objects are fascinating, you still can't deny that there is a lot of, er, space between them, so the name is justified after all...

Y'all need Aslan

Awe inspiring - can anyone point me to a description of the scale we're looking at? I'm sure it must be unimaginably large. What is the distance between the two top "arms" for example?

Edit: easier to find than I imagined and Good Lord! https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/8tfo8i/the_amazing_s... Difficult to comprehend.

The photo here has a scale bar. https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01G...

Looks to be maybe 2 light years between those two arms.

Thank you.

When I go outside I can barely see any stars, unlike my ancestors who saw a sky utterly filled with stars.

Then I go on my computer and I can see more stars, with more details, than my ancestors even imagined.

I can't decide if it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

Take a trip out to the mojave and you can see stars like your ancestors. It's awe-inspiring and otherwordly.

Or if you're on the East Coast, come to Pennsylvania! https://www.darksky.org/our-work/conservation/idsp/parks/che...

The Berkshires in western Massachussets, are also a place of amazing grandeur, in terms of visible night sky beauty.

That's sad but understandable. The night sky where I grew up is but a fraction of what was visible as a child.

Take a trip outside of well-lit areas if possible. See https://www.darksky.org/ to find a truly "dark" location.

This is very understandable. I myself grew up in a 'decent' night sky area. Then I moved to LA. Absolutely abysmal in terms of night sky visibility. I felt lucky to see a dozen or so stars.

Now, having moved to Flagstaff, AZ, a dark sky community, the night sky is fantastic. It has returned to me the beauty and wonder the sky once must have instilled in everyone. It's not the grand canyon, or deep in Death Valley or other parts of the Mojave. But it is enough. On new moons, not more than 30 minutes from town, the milky way can be so bright as to leave an 'afterglow' when one closes their eyes.

Computers and these images, while fascinating, will never truly rival the beauty of your own eyes seeing the night sky unaccosted by human development.

Frankly, viewing them via computer rather than up in the night sky is not a worthwhile comparison. Go to some dark sky area up in the mountains or in a desert canyon somewhere and look up. Yeah, you won't see as many stars but who cares. When you see the Milky Way so bright it appears three-dimensional, if you aren't overcome with a sense of absolute awe and are not humbled by what you are seeing, you aren't alive.

Maybe take a look at the International Dark Sky Places Program interactive map:

https://www.darksky.org/our-work/conservation/idsp/finder/

Same thing as looking at a picture of a mountain range vs actually being there. A 2d array of backlit pixels doesn't really convey much of the magic. Watching a box match (or any sport) on TV vs being there, attending a concert vs spotify. Real life will always provide more

Would it be possible for them to algorithmically remove the lens artifacts? I suppose just "anything with hexagonal symmetry gets deleted". They're kinda pretty but it's sad to think that this isn't what it would actually look like if you had really good infrared eyes.

Interesting- If you look closely at the super bright objects, there are both hexagonally symmetric artifacts and cardinal up/down/left/right artifacts. I’d love to hear from someone with knowledge of how these arise and what optical tradeoffs prevent designs from eliminating them.

It's possible through deconvolution with a model of the "point spread function" aka PSF. There are techniques from radio astronomy (where interferometry necessitates some kind of Fourier basis model and deconvolution/imaging procedure) which has been extended to the optical domain.

See for example: https://twitter.com/NGC3314/status/1582442367482634242?t=Eaa...

Isn't the PSF intensity-dependent? Can deconvolve high bit-depth data with a single filter? If not, aren't you limited by the distribution of intensities of the point sources present?

You can read about their formation on several publications. For instance: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/

There are 2 causes of diffraction spikes:

1. The hexagonal mirrors. Trade off is larger mirrors, and the ability to fold the telescope. 2. The struts holding the secondary mirror. Basically can't get rid of this without a very different telescope design.

Causes of both are the best design for getting a lot of light into a space telescope's sensors. In practice has less impact on the science than you might think. The diffraction spikes are much fainter than the main image. It's only bright foreground stars - which the James Webb isn't trying to image anyways - that cause visible spikes.

If you removed them wouldn't you just see black areas where they were?

Dunno. I'm guessing that you could remove them and see stars underneath them, because, after all, other parts of the telescope can see that patch of sky (the arms don't _entirely_ occlude it.. just from some angles). But I don't really know what I'm talking about.

As I understand it, they aren't exactly lens artifacts, they're stars in the foreground. The telescope can't see past them and we don't know what's there. To me, it would defeat the observational mission of the JWST to fill it in with some pixels that were similar to the rest of the background. However, I also think you raise a good point, since all these images are constructed from non-visible infra-red light and many decisions are made in that conversion process.

They're not talking about the stars, but the hexagonal spikes sticking out of the stars. Those are artifacts of the hexagonal lenses that the telescope uses.

I think you're both right to a degree? They are lens artifacts and we can't just remove them because we don't have the data of what's behind the spikes, as that is what the sensor can see. We'd be filling them in with black or our best guess based on neighboring pixels, either way it wouldn't be what one would "really" see. Unless we composited images from another source, then that'd come closer to accurate.

That seems right. For popular consumption it'd probably be nice to have a black-filled version or something, whatever is least visually off-putting, but for science that seems much, much worse.

No, the hexagonal spikes are artifacts of the arms holding the secondary mirror in place.

I've looked a little at this in the context of under display cameras, which introduce similar artifacts. They could remove these artifacts and generate realistic looking images that are physically plausible, but the content in regions where the artifacts are present are under determined and require some "guessing" or artistic expression. Probably better for NASA to keep things closer to the captured data in their primary releases.

Rotate the camera and bit and take another photo?

>Rotate the camera a bit

Not that easy if "the camera" is JWST.

What we need is 2 JWST that can compensate for each other.

Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

The price is mostly deploying, not building.

Some astro photographers use StarNet[1] to remove stars altogether. This allows you to blend them back in[2], potentially after additional processing.

As the name suggests, StarNet uses neural network for the job[3], and at least yet hasn't been trained on Webb data AFAIK, so might not do a good job there.

There also seems to be a similar tool with the same name over on github[4], but seems to be a separate effort.

[1]: https://www.starnetastro.com/

[2]: https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/

[3]: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/808556-starnet-v2/

[4]: https://github.com/nekitmm/starnet

Looks incredible, thanks for sharing! Hope they can remove stars from Webb’s Pillars of Creation at some point.

James Webb telescope is great and all, but I have to say I think the older image is more stunning and more aesthetically pleasing. Cleaner, simpler, nicer colors, more mysterious looking.

Get all those stars and galaxies out of my dust and gas photography!

I agree with this, and I hope a simple comparison of photos from the two telescopes does not capture headlines anymore. I hope the next story to hit the top is one about something new we learned due to JWST, which I am sure is already happening but maybe not grabbing our attention the same way.

100% agree, but of course that's not the point.

Webb's purpose is scientific measurements, not cool looking images. (Though wallpapers are a nice bonus!)

When it comes to aesthetically pleasing images, I'm consistently blown away by the composite images combining Webb with other devices like Chandra.

https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2022/chandrawebb/

I don't disagree with you exactly, but Webb is making some attempt at being aesthetically pleasing with these images and that work does seem to take them further from the Hubble look.

There was an article about the older Cosmic Cliffs image the other day which showed some in-progress images.[0]

Compare the final image after all editing: https://i.imgur.com/htJ25jw.jpg

With this version that's a pure stacking of colour layers: https://i.imgur.com/S1wkruc.jpg

The second one definitely has a more old-school 1990s Hubble look (and I kinda wish they'd release that version in high res).

[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/10/16/james-webb-te...

I like the new image better. The old Hubble image looks like it was generated by Midjourney eg 'Stars being formed in the hand of a galactic titan made from nebulas, mysterious, ethereal, ghostly, digital image, 4K.'

The image on Wikipedia[0] seems to have even less details than the comparison image[1], and so the effect is even greater. I really like the old image too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_nebula_pillars.jpg

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/st...

The new colours are artificial anyway, just change them

Why does it look like there's some really bright object shining from the top-right of the pillars, giving the impression that there's actually a shadow on it?

edit: right, not left.

edit 2: well, there's no impression here. There IS something larger shining it, the rest of the structure the pillars are part of.

Picture: (mobile users warning 52mb image) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Eagle_Ne...

IIRC it is radiation bouncing off its clumps of hydrogen from nearby stars.

Ah, so radiation is being emitted and blocked in a way that coincides to the way we interpret 3d objects, is that right? Because if it would be uniform, the bright orange colors would be uniformly distributed?

> so radiation is being emitted and blocked in a way that coincides to the way we interpret 3d objects

It's not coincidental, this is how our vision works.

No, I was thinking in terms that the pillars are glowing and illuminating themselves, which would be really coincidence to have this luminescence only on areas that would look like a shadow or not.

It turns out that for my original question, there is actually something illuminating it from the top-right. As massive as the pillars are, they are part of a yet bigger structure [0] and the brightness generated is allowing us to see it with better depth. It's really incomprehensible to grasp how large things can get.

[0]: (mobile data warning 52mb pic) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Eagle_Ne...

> > so radiation is being emitted and blocked in a way that coincides to the way we interpret 3d objects

> It's not coincidental, this is how our vision works.

to preserve the meaning he intended with the meaning you are trying to refute, try instead the word "coincident"

It's not coincidental that the phenomena are coincident to how our vision words, the geometry of the science coincides

I understand Nebulae like the Eagle Nebula are fairly dynamic regions of space, so I find it interesting that we have photographs of the same region over a 27 years time span and at a glance, the structure of the Pillars of Creation appears virtually identical.

I understand that 27 years is minuscule on the cosmic timescale, but what order of timescale would be necessary for the evolution of Pillars of Creation to be are apparent to a casual observer? hundreds of years? thousands?

A bit more cosmic scale that we can see over time are light echos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_echo

In particular, the at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V838_Monocerotis there's a video of the echo.

For another dynamic area with things changing on a human lifespan, the black hole at the center of the galaxy we can watch stars orbit it. https://youtu.be/XA7CAVm31z0

The classic example of this is the Hubble Variable Nebula. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2261 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeiVERr2J2Q

WR 140 is also a neat one with cosmic scale structures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WR_140

And the mechanism for it - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/star-duo-forms-fingerprint-in-...

Very cool video, but mislabeled. It shows stars approaching and passing their perihelion to SagA* 27Kya, not complete orbits.

Even more interesting when you think about the plethora of events that must be happening there in this interval of time at human scale. The Sun alone, 8 light minutes away, in seconds is consuming hydrogen and generating energy at amounts that we as humanity could use for thousands and thousands of years.

The Crab nebula (from a supernova in the year 1054) is visibly changing over the decades: https://vimeo.com/253674871 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyejd1N8d-U

The pillars of creation are somewhere between four to five light years across. Unless the entire dust cloud moves at relativistic speeds it's going to take a lot of time for any change to be visible when zoomed out that far

Every time I see a photo of Pillars of Creation it makes me wonder if we would even be able to distinguish an unfathomably optimized engineered system from what we consider raw physics with our current understanding.

With our current understanding, we could not do this.

This follows from the fact that there is still a lot of “raw physics” we do not fully understand. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...

"Any sufficiently advanced engineered system is indistinguishable from raw physics."

¿Por qué no los dos? That's what I've always loved about creation; designed and ordered, with principles and physical constants that result in just so much gobsmacking beauty, from the macro to the micro scale, and yet, it can be intelligible to us in math and science.

Looking up at the night sky, I've always found it to be an awesome experience, in a very literal sense. Looking at these comparisons of the Hubble and Webb images (especially esawebb.org's slider) made me audibly chuckle because I've long been impressed by the Hubble images for all the stars it revealed beyond those visible to ground-based telescopes, much less simple stargazers. With Webb, it just blows my mind how many more stars there are out there; the deeper IR, big mirror, and nice shady spot at L2 result in orders of magnitude difference, and to think of all the stars outside of our Hubble volume that are receding too fast for us to ever witness from here. We live in a truly amazing reality.

What's up with all the "lens flares"? Is this a flaw in the imaging? Some real phenomenon? Or just an artistic license effect that has been added to increase visual appeal?

They're diffraction spikes from the design of the telescope. https://www.theverge.com/23220109/james-webb-space-telescope...

I was wondering that too. I'm not a photography expert, but i recall that lens flares are in the shape of the lens. Since the telescope uses those honeycomb lenses, the 6-sided flares seem to make sense. Happy to be corrected of course.

If by "lens flares" we're referring to the 6 spikey lines jetting from the stars, those are known as diffraction spikes and are a result of the 3 spider vanes holding the secondary mirror in front of the primary mirror cluster at the center of the optical axis. As light enters the primary mirror cluster in the JWT, bright points of lights such as stars have visible aberrations due to the position and orientation of these vanes. In the JWT which uses 3 of them, their orientation creates this 6 spike diffraction pattern. In the case of the Hubble telescope, which is based on the RC telescope design, it uses 4 vanes which creates a 4 spike diffraction pattern instead.

Every time I see these wonderful pictures I wonder if the occupants of planets (or other structures) in this region look out across a vast horizon of amassed material and wonder if those distant 'holes' or 'gaps' in their view lead to something more .. some wider 'universe' of large space .. and what would their incredulity be once their explorers make it to the end of the 'large mass' (if ever) and see the great, giant hole into which we are all born. They wouldn't need rockets - they'd need incredibly long-lasting wheel-based devices, just to see what is beyond their world.

Like, do fish ever see the air above their world and wonder if there is anything more .. its just mind-boggling to think about.

If I were of a species born on one of these Pillars, I wonder if I would see the stars and all the emptiness, eventually, as anything other than an extreme abhorrence...

I don't know if Space Engine or Universe Simulator have anything interesting with the Pillars, but I can comment on two games that do:

- Elite Dangerous lets you travel to the Eagle Nebula, but the developers have unfortunately decided that the Pillars no longer exist in the 34th century. It's probably a tradeoff to let them effectively simulate the scale of the Milky Way, if not all of its details. (EDIT: OK, stupid mistake on my part; they are 7,000 LY away so they not even exist anymore today. But I doubt that was the reason they're not in the game.)

- If you have a Playstation and Media Molecule's Dreams, I remember seeing a really cool 3D Pillars experience a few years ago made by player DrowsyBadger. https://indreams.me/dream/mwuocvFmnEt

> humans will continue to see the standing pillars for another 1,000 years.

[Source](https://futurism.com/the-pillars-of-creation)

The game uses an infinite speed of light when rendering the skybox, so you don't even see the Pillars from Earth, even if you would 1300 years from now. In the real world? Eh, I searched around and found conflicting information from this and other equally reputable sources. I guess the only thing I can believe definitively about the Pillars' existence is that no one we will ever know will ever know anyone who will ever know.

Our understanding of physics might improve and we might know (with enough confidence) before the light reaches us.

Possibly! I think it's more likely that our understanding of these astrophysics matters will improve only ONCE the light reaches us.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01G...

Wild picture, but less sublime than the original. Same feels when NASA/ESA deconstructed the gas layers in 3d to refect the thin layers (like old school parallax animation background) instead of the awesome awesome voluminous celestia architecture I had in my head. Some old shows look worse in HD.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/pillars-of-creati...

I do kinda get a bit more "oomph" from the old picture because it feels like it's been punched out of space rather than being a wispy thing in the way (e.g. you can see more stars through it.) Which is bonkers because the new photo is amazing.

>"oomph"

Yeah, I think James Webb (being amazing) and resolving so much more stars in these photos kind of removes the oomph of original Hubble photos that showed seemingly lonely cosmic monoliths in largely empty void Which made the subject feel more sublime. New photos have so much stars which everywhere, shifts the enormity of structures onto the sheer abundance of the background universe. It makes the subject feel smaller by revealing just how much bigger the cosmos is. Amazing in a different way.

Clearly Birkland Filament Braids doing a Z-Pinch to create the stars. This can clearly be seen in the glowing red regions, the only regions actively creating stars.

Why are so many low magnitude stars in this image, not shrouded by gas, not visible at all in the previous image? Surely some visible light must be emitted by these?

If they are red-shifted enough, Hubble wouldn't have seen them at all.

Keep in mind that while the X and Y axes in this shot are only a few light years across, the Z axis is potentially 13 billion light years deep.

Imagine the civilizations that live between these pillars.

Can they live in the pillars?

Seems like it would be a hellish place.

Yeah, very high radiation zone. There could be pockets where it's safer, but still no picnic.

I was wondering the same. I am worried for them that they might be situated in a permanently light polluted skies, that would be really sad for all the astronomers in that civilizations.

Imagine all the civilizations taking photographs of these pillars and wondering about the civilizations that live between the pillars.

There probably aren't any.

It’s an immense amount of space, 70 light years across, with many star systems, there must be at least one.

And yet, nothing

Their YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1__KBHIo_xs) sounds like it's being narrated by a TikTok influencer.

They're known for their strangely excited sounding monotones, although the only example I can think of is the not so scientific "burger king foot lettuce" video.

It almost looks like a hand grasping for the stars.

Is there some limit on the number of pictures the Webb Telescope can take in a day?

Every time I see a picture from it, I just want more.

I assume it takes some time to aim the telescope.

I think the bottleneck is actually the connection down to earth

Depends on the image I think, shutterspeed can easily be a few hours

There is a 68GB capacity SSD which limits how much data it can store and it can transmit 28GB to earth per 24 hours. It operation is batch operation. Job files are queued up to operate at specific times.

Curious why there's a cut off in the photos corners. Is the field of view smaller than Hubbles?

Either way I was waiting for this photo. Ever since I learned about the Webb telescope, I've been eager to see its take on the Pillars, which is one of my favorite photos ever. It did not disappoint.

Stunningly beautiful. Nothing insightful to add except that I absolutely love this! Thank you for sharing, @pizza.

Is there a way to search it for repeating patterns to catch any shortcuts the Simulation may have taken?

I know we're joking but, on a smaller scale...Periodic structures in crystals or beehives (for examples) would be shortcut of the simulation or just manifestations of underlying laws?

Shortcuts are expensive. Rather have simple set of rules and just apply it to everything.

While grabbing the popcorn and see where simulation goes by itself of course.

If the simulation is for humans only it doesn't need to be simulated, might be just a static sky box.

If you look the picture in the Webb's original rotation, there are 4 shining stars (?) on the middle-right of the picture. Now, if you follow down with your eyes, there's a structure that's eerily similar to the Pillars :)

As a software engineer working in an astronomy institute, it's nice to see the excitement around the outputs of this project. It's pleasing to see an intersect between people enjoying the image, and discussing some of the technical details.

Is there a way to get rid of the six diffusion spikes in images from James Webb? Deconvolution or something? I guess it would have some cost in terms of resolution, but I think it would be worth it for these sorts of publicity images.

What causes these spikes? I see there are also smaller ones pointing up and down too. I don't understand why any of these are there or pointing in those directions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike

According to Wikipedia, the left (top) column is four lightyears in length.

It seems like the pillar is lit from an angle? Is this an artifact of some other phenomena (eg higher density being at the same side of the pillars) or is there a nearby star shining on it?

The most recent image is near-infrared light (per the captions), so the parts of the image that look brightest are where the most near-infrared light is. Also, it's a star nursery, so areas brightest are (I believe) where the new stars are forming. If they're the biggest source of near-infrared light in the area, that would explain the lighting angles.

Just wow

Yep

Inner geek: "Wow, the resolution is incredible! What an amazing technical feat."

Inner insignificant mote of life hurtling through the cosmos: "Wow, I feel so tiny and fragile and humbled."

Can someone explain what I'm seeing here? It looks like there are stars in front of the Pillars of Creation itself. Is this an illusion?

Can someone explain to me why the stars have varying hue to them; whitish, bluish, orang-ish.

Is this due to the camera itself or the distance the light has to travel ?

There's actually quite a lot of natural variation in star temperature, and therefore color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence Normally you can't see it because the color-sensing cones in your eyes need more light. Low light vision is monochrome.

All the stars visible in this photo are inside our galaxy, so there's no distance (metric expansion) redshift. The Eagle nebula lies near the galactic ecliptic plane, so background dust obscures extragalactic galaxies. When JWST points away from the milky way, though, its deep sky images can see light from so far away that the expansion of the universe shifts it deep into the infrared.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-...

The stars in this photo have six points. Anything without the diffraction pattern is a galaxy. Each of those smudges of light have maybe 100 billion stars each, and are billions of light years away.

The universe is big.

I wish our planet was closer to it so we could send some probes into it. Knowing it wouldn't look like this up close, I still like to imagine.

Nothing outside our solar system is close enough to send probes to explore.

Perhaps we could blanket our system with robotic explorers for now. In the big scheme of things, it would be inexpensive.

I noticed that the background is blue - could anyone explain why it's not gray or black? Is that just how they rendered it?

I learned yesterday from a local-language article on this news, that the Pillars don't actually exist anymore, for a long time already. We'll gawk at them for several hundred years still, before we see a supernova wipe them away. Supposedly this was discovered with the Spitzer telescope somehow—I'll need to find sources in English, but at least the local publication is not on the grade of Daily Mail.

Edit: sounds like this bit, and the journalists' info is then outdated:

> Evidence from the Spitzer Space Telescope originally suggested that the pillars in M16 may be threatened by a "past supernova". Hot gas observed by Spitzer in 2007 suggested they were already – likely – being disturbed by a supernova that exploded 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. Due to the distance the main blast of light would have reached Earth for a brief time 1,000 to 2,000 years ago. A more slowly moving, theorized, shock wave would have taken a few thousand years to move through the nebula and would have blown away the delicate pillars. However, in 2014 the pillars were imaged a second time by Hubble, in both visible light and infrared light. The images being 20 years later provided a new, detailed account of the rate of evaporation occurring within the pillars. No supernova is evidenced within them, and it is estimated in some form they still exist – and will appear for at least 100,000 more years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula)

A somewhat different account is in the article for the Pillars themselves, with more external sources:

> Images taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope uncovered a cloud of hot dust in the vicinity of the Pillars of Creation that Nicolas Flagey accounted to be a shock wave produced by a supernova. The appearance of the cloud suggests the supernova shockwave would have destroyed the Pillars of Creation 6,000 years ago. Given the distance of roughly 7,000 light-years to the Pillars of Creation, this would mean that they have actually already been destroyed, but because light travels at a finite speed, this destruction should be visible from Earth in about 1,000 years. However, this interpretation of the hot dust has been disputed by an astronomer uninvolved in the Spitzer observations, who argues that a supernova should have resulted in stronger radio and x-ray radiation than has been observed, and that winds from massive stars could instead have heated the dust. If this is the case, the Pillars of Creation will undergo a more gradual erosion. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation#Theorized_...)

TBH these mechanics are confusing to me, because one of them says the wave will reach the Pillars in a thousand years (from our viewpoint), whereas the other claims that since we don't see the disturbance now, it's all fine and dandy. Coincidentally, no sources are supplied for the latter view.

I'd love to see more details about this. How do we know that a supernova wiped them out if the light of that event hasn't reached us yet? Is the supernova itself closer to us and have we seen it, and scientists calculated that it will wipe out the Pillars?

I updated my above comment, after cooling off enough to actually open Wikipedia. Afaiu we see the remnants of the supernova as well, but it was far from the Pillars, and the wave will take some time to travel there—hundreds to a thousand years still. Otoh the part where the wiping-away was hypothesized but disconfirmed with Hubble, seems to be at odds with this account, because it says we should be seeing the disturbance already. It's all rather confusing.

Is there somewhere I could see this pic as it would appear to the naked human eye?

look up? You're not going to be able to see any but the brightest astronomical features with your naked eye.

This is great stuff, hopefully the JWST can deliver images like this for a long time to come.

Does anybody know what the scale of this image is when measure in AU per pixel?

Notice how every star twinkles the same way. I thought it was because of how the mirrors were arrayed. But this time the twinkles are different.

Do you mean the hexagonal diffusion spikes? How are they different this time? I think the JWST image is just rotated to better align with the Hubble image.

*deep existential crisis intensifies*

Oh no, It's The Claw!!!

"The claw! The claw is back!" (Gary Larson, 1982)

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/the-far-side-by-gary-larson--4...

Old Far Side cartoons now viewable (since a couple of years ago, but not linkable) at https://www.thefarside.com

This is mindblowingly cool

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