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.
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.
[1] https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/screen/heic15...
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...
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.
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.
About what you'd see from a 16 inch telescope in a superb dark sky location. A red smudge with hints of finer detail.
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.
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.
We don't spend oodles of money to build sensitive instruments to observe things you could see with the unaided eye.
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.
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
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.
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)
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).
(This is purely speculation.)
Anything in JWST that is lower frequency (yellow to red) will not be visible to Hubble
Of course the electronics are better so some of the image capturing is better but the resolution is not.
“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