True color, visible spectrum images could help garner public support for missions like this. When I see these images, I imagine future humans enjoying a fly by, looking out a large transparent window, and seeing these amazing views.
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?