Neat! Voyager 2 took a high resolution true color photo[1] of Uranus in 1986, as well, but you can't make out the rings.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus#/media/File:Uranus_as_s...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus#/media/File:Uranus_as_s...
Arguably there is no "true" translation; the point of JW capturing what spectrum it does, is to reveal features obscured or invisible in the visible spectrum.
Over the years I have come to reject the "what would the plain eye see" position as not helpful. We're tool-using monkeys and the phones we carry around now run supercomputers to quietly show not what the plain eye sees but something which works better for our needs—to be both evocative and information-rich.
If and when we ever get a chance to gaze on Uranus ourselves, I myself imagine and hope it will be courtesy of some transformation of our embodiment that will look an order richer than even the most stylized images we have today, because they will be broad spectrum and be overlayed with semantic content rendered as perceptual to aid our executive functions... all of which will probably be running on some computation substrate other than our monkey mammal selves. Space isn't kind to those.
It seems a shame they didn't include the 400-600nm range as well.
This seems to be a basic misunderstanding of the purpose of the telescope.
To my understand, you cannot see the rings of uranus in the visible range. And remember all those first images from the JWST, those garnered public support preeetty heavily and those were all infrared and translated.
On the science side, some wavelengths just do not survive interstellar travel. You need the entire range to get the most data. Lots of times visible phenomena are just white or grey or blue anyways. When there's something that's actually more interesting in visible light, we'll see it.
If we have to survive in space, we'll have to see the rings of Uranus, if only to avoid them when we fly by in your space ship :)
As the article points out, they are extremely boring to look at. A lot of space objects are that way.
The mission of the JWST is to look at these other wavelengths where there is more interesting activity and where the signal from that activity survives the trip to (near) earth.
Complaining about JWST not making visible spectrum light images is like complaining that a hammer doesn't really work driving in a screw. It's not meant to do that, so stop trying to do it, and definitely stop complaining about it since it's just a misunderstanding of its purpose.
Think of it like the *nix core belief that you design a thing to do one thing be really fast at it and do it really well while avoiding making something that does a lot of things mediocre and not nearly as fast. We have platforms that are better at imaging visible light. A lot of them. We have nothing with the capabilities of JWST. We have X-ray telescopes. We have microwave telescopes.
Trying to ask JWST to be a shittier IR telescope to enable visible light imaging is just a waste of time, effort, and money.
[0]https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html?linkId...
No need to call him an "ass" over it, just apologize politely :)
it's only a shame if you don't understand the entire purpose of the telescope. if you understood the purpose of the telescope, you'd realize why trying to make it do both IR and visible light would be pointless. to catch the faintest light of the furthest galaxies that has been red-shifted we need the most sensitive instrument would could make. ignoring blue and green wavelengths is the only way of doing it. you make every decision to enhance the ability to see the red.
it's like saying it's a shame drum&bass doesn't have more guitars. you might have that opinion, but it is absolutely pointless in the purpose of the thing your opinion is about.
Which device is more impressive and would garner more public support for the project: an amplifier which just makes the squeaks louder? Or one which also pitches down the squeaks into a range where we can actually perceive and appreciate the tune & dynamics of the underlying music?
It's how we generally see pictures of Earth, e.g. from the point of view of a space walk from the ISS.
If I look out the window of my spaceship and Uranus doesn't look like this photo, the post processing done here doesn't match with "reality" too well.
And since showing infrared picture to folks who can't see in it is less than pointless, they just shift it all into visible to a 'place' on spectrum which makes most sense for given picture. There can be some choosing fancier shades done there for general public but I would be surprised if they completely re-painted original 'shift' just to look more fancy (happy to learn the facts if anybody knows in any case).
If you want to look very deep into the past, say, 13 billion years ago, any light from galaxies that old has traveled 13 billion light years PLUS however much the universe has expanded and will be red-shifted out of the visible spectrum, so you need an infra-red telescope to see it. Hence, JWST.
You simply can't see these things without using instruments that can detect the right light.
On top of that, everything in the universe emits light across a broad spectrum, above and below the visible spectrum. We can enhance our knowledge of these things; stars, planets, galaxies, etc by using instruments that can "see" infra-red, radio, x-ray, gamma ray and that is additional information on top of what our eyes can see in the visible spectrum.
punchline drum roll