[HN Gopher] James Webb first images - complete set of high resol...
___________________________________________________________________
James Webb first images - complete set of high resolution shots now
live
Author : crhulls
Score : 929 points
Date : 2022-07-12 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (webbtelescope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (webbtelescope.org)
| leeoniya wrote:
| the Southern Ring Nebula (MIRI Image) is bizarrely very low res?
|
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/033/01G...
| fumblebee wrote:
| Wow you're right, huge difference in the sizes of the "full
| res" images:
|
| > MIRI: Full Res, 1306 X 1133, TIF (1.78 MB) [1]
|
| > NIR Cam: Full Res, 4833 X 4501, TIF (24.06 MB) [2]
|
| Maybe it's a mistake, they suggest it should offer an
| "incredible amount of detail": This Mid-
| Infrared Instrument (MIRI) image also offers an _incredible
| amount of detail_, including a cache of distant galaxies in the
| background.
|
| [1]
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/033/01G...
|
| [2]
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/033/01G...
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| MIRI works at longer wavelengths than NIRCam, so its angular
| resolution is lower (longer wavelengths mean more
| diffraction). It also has a smaller field of view.
|
| Those two factors mean that it has fewer pixels per image.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Well, it's incredible in the sense that I can't believe it
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's the effect of the wavelength of far infrared light being
| quite a bit longer.
|
| Think of a reduction to extremes: if you have a sensor that is
| a centimeter square and you're trying to 'catch' a wave that is
| a meter long there is a fair chance the sensor will be bypassed
| entirely, but if you are trying to catch millimeter waves your
| sensor will be easily able to capture the photons.
|
| The most practical example of this effect is the size of radio
| antennae, they get longer as the wavelength gets longer.
| taftster wrote:
| So, am I to get this right? The universe, it's big. Like really
| big?
| SapporoChris wrote:
| Not only is the universe big, really big. Unimaginably big. You
| are also by comparison, small, unimaginably small.
| Infinitesimally small. Be that as it may, do the best you can.
|
| Less flippantly, the number of galaxies in the images is just
| mind boggling. I'm looking forward to seeing 3d explorable map
| of the galaxies someday. I know it will happen if it hasn't
| already.
| hulahoof wrote:
| I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the
| chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
| AlexFielder wrote:
| Serious question: How do I explain this to my nine year old?
| 87tau wrote:
| Unsure what you want to explain or what your nine year old
| already knows, but generally I would start by explaining to
| him/her/them that these are pictures of very far away and
| enormous objects taken from a telescope that is located further
| away than the moon.
|
| The telescope takes pictures in a different frequency band,
| like an infrared camera. These pictures are then color mapped
| to blue, green yellow and other colors that you normally see
| because just black and white image are boring to look at.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Explain what? There's a telescope in space?
| mparnisari wrote:
| I have no idea what i'm looking at or how much effort this took
| but it looks gorgeous and it's my new desktop background.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _James Webb Telescope First Images - Livestream_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070531 - July 2022 (8
| comments)
|
| _Deepest infrared image of universe_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062849 - July 2022 (334
| comments)
|
| _James Webb Space Telescope White House Briefing_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139 - July 2022 (91
| comments)
| tpae wrote:
| What is that brightest light?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Nice night to get insomnia!
| yaya69 wrote:
| oittaa wrote:
| Unfortunately the NASA stream online was a disaster. Choppy video
| and it seemed like nobody had prepared anything. Also 720p in
| 2022...
|
| Don't get me wrong, the images are amazing, but when small
| startups like Rocket Lab can have uninterrupted streams all the
| way to the orbit, but NASA stream from a studio looks more
| amateurish than your average 13-year-old Fortnite player on
| Twitch, it leaves a pretty bad impression.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| I think NASA's funding generally goes towards doing science
| rather than optimizing their Fortnite streams
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| the classic "hacker news landing page critique" applied to
| nasa, love it
| ehsankia wrote:
| Seriously it was such a mess. Lag aside, they had MULTIPLE
| cases of either someone's mic not being on, or someone with a
| hot mic after they were done whispering over the stream. Almost
| every single transition to scientists in other cities failed.
| This is really unfortunate because they hyped up this event big
| time. They announced it two weeks in advance, had a countdown,
| even had scientists do "reaction" videos to seeing the photos
| for the first time...
|
| People often underestimate how insanely hard it is to put
| something like this together, but I'm surprised NASA did, It's
| not like it's the first time NASA does a livecast.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| I'm not sure if NASA or the White House directed that stream.
| I've seen much better-organized streams from NASA. It wasn't
| just technically flawed. It was late, abrupt, disjointed and
| the talking points appeared to be delivered by people that had
| little knowledge in the matter. I can't believe I saw that
| level of disorganization from our highest executive office.
| kryptn wrote:
| I've seen this comparison floating around for the deep field.
|
| https://imgsli.com/MTE2Mjc3
| slfnflctd wrote:
| The exoplanet analysis is what I'm most intrigued by. They're
| getting much more data than in the past on these.
|
| Of course they went for an easy gas giant target first (it has
| lots of water, which is great), but those Earth-like planets in
| the Goldilocks zone are gonna be some of the most exciting stuff
| that comes out of this. Looking forward to it.
| kentonv wrote:
| So is there any reason not to point this at Proxima Centauri b,
| like, ASAP?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b
| yupper32 wrote:
| I don't know about Proxima Centauri b, but they'll be
| spending around 25% of "Cycle 1" (the first 6,000 hours of
| science) working on exoplanets, don't worry:
|
| "Over the coming year, researchers will use spectroscopy to
| analyze the surfaces and atmospheres of several dozen
| exoplanets, from small rocky planets to gas- and ice-rich
| giants. Nearly one-quarter of Webb's Cycle 1 observation time
| is allocated to studying exoplanets and the materials that
| form them." - https://www.nasa.gov/image-
| feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| WASP-96b has an orbit that passes in front of its star,
| Proxima Centauri b doesn't.
|
| An obvious target for the coronagraph for regular imaging,
| but there's no way to get a transmission spectrum of its
| atmosphere.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 1150 light years away! Imagine how much more details can be
| detected for stuff within 50 light years.
|
| Really, they should be already building 2nd James Webb. I am
| sure even 10 of them would get 100% utilization for their whole
| lifetime. I can only imagine what kind of needless political
| game is happening around prioritization of time slots for it.
|
| Or start working on next-gen, bigger, more resilient etc. It
| costs peanuts compared to any significant CERN upgrade and we
| have so much room to progress in astronomy (aka understanding
| our home, this universe) just by getting more data and
| resolution.
| mden wrote:
| The next NASA space telescope is The Nancy Grace Roman Space
| Telescope - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/the-nancy-
| grace-roman-spac....
| jacquesm wrote:
| I fear there won't be any more JWSTs at all. People are
| already bitching about how much it cost and that all it does
| is make pretty pictures right here in this thread and there
| were many times that it came within a hair of having its
| budget slashed.
|
| Super happy we have _one_ JWST, and I hope fervently that it
| will outlast its original mission by a large fraction, every
| sign right now points in that direction.
| coldpie wrote:
| > People are already bitching about how much it cost
|
| I like to point out that Microsoft could have paid for
| seven JWSTs (development costs and all) with what they paid
| for one Activision.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Now imagine the funding for all the spy satellite
| programs over the past few decades...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hubble _definitely_ piggybacked on the defense
| applications, for JWST that isn 't the case.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Was worth every penny.
| frebord wrote:
| Is there any attempt or is it even possible to correct for the
| distortion caused by the gravitational lensing?
| lbrito wrote:
| I remember reading something in the lines of: we know this nebula
| to be composed of gasses X and Y, which have colors A and B. As a
| layman it was unclear to me if this statement means they are
| applying a color palette to a monochrome image(s) using some
| educated guesses or something else.
|
| Is infrared the only (or the most convenient, most useful etc)
| spectrum visible given the great distance? If we could get close
| enough, I suppose we would see things in clearer visible light.
| Without any enhancements, long exposures etc, would they be
| anywhere as colorful as the nebula images? Would they be visible
| to us at all, or are the emissions too weak even up close to make
| any impression to our eyes?
| pkaye wrote:
| They have dozens filters on the telescope so they take multiple
| pictures at different wavelength and assign colors to them and
| combine them.
|
| The galaxies from the early universe would not be visible in
| the visible spectrum since due to red shift, its become
| infrared spectrum. Also infrared spectrum can see through
| stellar dust so some things become more transparent in the
| photos.
| zanecodes wrote:
| (Disclaimer: I am not an astronomer)
|
| As you may be aware, all digital images are composed of a color
| palette applied to monochrome images, it just so happens that
| we usually pick a color palette of red, green, and blue, which
| ideally correspond as closely as possible to the three
| wavelengths of light to which the imaging sensors in our
| cameras (and also our eyes) are sensitive, thus reproducing
| what our eyes would see in person.
|
| In the case of JWST, mid- and far-infrared sensors were chosen
| for several reasons, the first being that due to the
| accelerating expansion of the universe, light from further away
| (equivalently, light from further back in time) has been
| stretched out along its path of travel, causing its wavelength
| to be shifted further into the infrared spectrum. Another
| possible reason is that infrared wavelengths penetrate the
| interstellar dust clouds much better than visible or
| ultraviolet light, allowing us to see stars and galaxies that
| were previously hidden by dust.
|
| Since JWST captures wavelengths of light that we can't see, we
| have to apply some sort of visible-light palette to the
| monochrome images it sends back. At the bottom of this image,
| you can see which wavelengths were mapped to which visible-
| light colors: https://stsci-
| opo.org/STScI-01G7N9A6934R1WRWBJY1ZXB98B.png One key aspect of
| this mapping is that the order of wavelengths has been
| preserved; shorter IR wavelengths are colored blue while longer
| ones are colored red. It's likely that this mapping is non-
| linear though, so the relative distances between IR wavelengths
| are not the same as the distances between the hues in the
| image, and this mapping was chosen to maximize the visible
| detail in the resulting image, as well as to highlight
| scientifically relevant information such as dust clouds and
| areas of star formation, so it's not totally arbitrary.
|
| In addition, the dynamic range of JWST is much much larger than
| the pixels in any display. The raw data values probably range
| from 0 to some hundreds of thousands, while your display's
| pixel brightness can only go from 0 to 255 (or maybe 1023, if
| you have a 10-bit HDR display). While we could simply map the
| maximum pixel value to 255 and compress everything else in
| between, this would lose nearly all of the detail present in
| the darker regions of the images, compressing them to 0.
| Instead, a non-linear brightness mapping is applied, to best
| represent all the information present in darker regions without
| blowing out the bright stars and galaxies.
|
| So to answer your questions, the colors shown in the images are
| not what you would see in person. Without any enhancements you
| probably wouldn't be able to see much if any of the dust
| clouds, and many of the redder galaxies would not be visible to
| you at all, while all the rest would be different hues than the
| ones shown (probably mostly whites, yellows, and reds).
| Barrera wrote:
| It's easy to lose sight of this in the amazing images:
|
| > In a dream come true for exoplaneteers, NASA's James Webb Space
| Telescope has demonstrated its unprecedented ability to analyze
| the atmosphere of a planet more than 1,000 light-years away. With
| the combined forces of its 270-square-foot mirror, precision
| spectrographs, and sensitive detectors, Webb has - in a single
| observation - revealed the unambiguous signature of water,
| indications of haze, and evidence for clouds that were thought
| not to exist based on prior observations. The transmission
| spectrum of the hot gas giant WASP-96 b, made using Webb's Near-
| Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, provides just a
| glimpse into the brilliant future of exoplanet research with
| Webb.
|
| and later:
|
| > WASP-96 b is one of more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in the
| Milky Way. Located roughly 1,150 light-years away in the
| southern-sky constellation Phoenix, it represents a type of gas
| giant that has no direct analog in our solar system. With a mass
| less than half that of Jupiter and a diameter 1.2 times greater,
| WASP-96 b is much puffier than any planet orbiting our Sun. And
| with a temperature greater than 1000degF, it is significantly
| hotter. WASP-96 b orbits extremely close to its Sun-like star,
| just one-ninth of the distance between Mercury and the Sun,
| completing one circuit every 31/2 Earth-days.
| datadata wrote:
| When I was observing the 2017 total solar eclipse, my attention
| was interrupted for a few seconds by someone who was driving a
| car. Their headlights turned on as they kept driving, not
| stopping for a minute to see something that for a given place on
| earth happens once every four centuries. The few people
| dismissing this reminded me of that experience.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I know people who care greatly about the JWST but will go
| around the company slack belittling people for wishing happy
| new year, wielding a cosmic cudgel of unimportance on the day.
|
| But everything humans find important are only that due to human
| and sociological constructs, whether calendrical or
| cosmological. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. The
| unthinking matter of nature is utterly indifferent (as far as
| we know or think).
|
| - someone who drove a long, long way to see the same solar
| eclipse, no regrets!
| amelius wrote:
| I'd like to see some shots of Earth too.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Disclaimer: IANA scientist of any sort, just a huge nerd.
|
| I've been interested in astronomy since I learned to read, and
| JWST has been planned for most of my life(all but 2 years if you
| count all explorations of ideas for a post-hubble telescope since
| about 95). I've been waiting for this my whole life, so this
| feels like a strangely personal event to me even though I had
| nothing to do with it myself. It's so hard to even put into words
| the tremendousness of this technological and scientific
| achievement, so I won't try.
|
| Anyway, enough sap.
|
| I'm super stoked that they've already started taking spectra of
| exoplanets. This one was sort of an "easier" one but the detail
| was unprecedented as with all the other observations. I can't
| wait to see some results on some of these smaller rocky planets
| in their star's "goldilocks zone".
|
| These are the planets that have simply been out of reach until
| now, and are the most interesting in terms of searching for signs
| of life.
| chaps wrote:
| Direct links --
|
| Stephan's Quintet (NIRCam and MIRI Composite Image):
|
| https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7DB1FHPMJCCY59CQGZC1YJQ.png
|
| Southern Ring Nebula (NIRCam and MIRI Images Side by Side):
|
| https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G79R28V7S4AXDN8NG5QCPGE3.png
|
| "Cosmic Cliffs" in the Carina Nebula (NIRCam Image):
|
| https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7ETPF7DVBJAC42JR5N6EQRH.png
|
| Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam Image):
|
| https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7DDBW5NNXTJV8PGHB0465QP.png
|
| Exoplanet WASP-96 b (NIRISS Transmission Spectrum):
|
| https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7NBXDHYYSVBP2M476PRGG3A.png
| samstave wrote:
| May anyone please ELI5 how to interpret the WASP-96 water
| spectrum graph above?
| coldpie wrote:
| Elements absorb light at certain frequencies. Given a
| spectral analysis of the light that passes through the
| atmosphere and another of the light that doesn't pass through
| the atmosphere, you can take the difference and see what
| frequencies were absorbed by the atmosphere. This tells you
| what elements make up the atmosphere. The H2O sections in the
| graph are the light frequencies that are absorbed by water
| molecules ("amount of light blocked" on the Y axis),
| indicating that the atmosphere contains water.
|
| More here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_spectroscopy
|
| Much more about this particular graph here:
| https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-
| webb-...
| vishnugupta wrote:
| If it helps others like me, I found it easier to download the
| images through wget and then open the local file through
| browser.
| pwned1 wrote:
| My god, look at the _background_ of the first image at full
| scale.
| jcims wrote:
| I really wish astronomers would come up (or use) a standard
| mechanism for indicating the field of view of an image. The
| scale of this one in the night sky is much larger than the
| deep field one.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Grain of sand at arms length for yesterday's deep field.
| luqtas wrote:
| is not lovely it reached internet just after 80% of the
| planet being able to see the sun?
| racingmars wrote:
| The image details do have the dimensions listed in a
| standard measure down under the "Fast Facts" section; I
| assume this will be included for every image release.
|
| The deep field image says it's about 2.4 arcmin across[1],
| Stephan's Quintet image is about 7.4 arcmin across[2], etc.
|
| [1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/03
| 5/01G... [2] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/image
| s/2022/034/01G...
| oAlbe wrote:
| Is there a way to rapport an arcmin to a measurement that
| would be more easily understandable? Not necessarily as a
| multiple of grains of rice.
| yvoschaap wrote:
| 7.3 arcminutes = 16 light-years
| mwint wrote:
| Wait, but it's a ~cone, right? So it must be 16ly across
| at some specific distance from us?
| agrajag wrote:
| That's the distance of an object away that has a parallax
| of 7.3 arcminutes and a baseline of 1AU. The 7.3
| arcminutes referenced here is the width of the image on
| the celestial sphere.
| jcims wrote:
| Your thumb at arms length is ~2 degrees or ~120
| arcminutes wide. The fingernail on your index finger at
| arm's length is ~1 degree or 60 arcminutes wide.
|
| The moon is about half a degree or 30 arcminutes wide.
| This doesn't make sense but give it a try tonight if the
| moon is out.
|
| FWIW many of the galaxies and nebula you see in
| astrophotography are actually bigger in the night sky
| than one might guess. Andromeda for example is about 6
| times wider than the moon at ~3 degrees across -
| https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-
| rela...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I propose we use Moon Diameters (MD) as the official HN
| unit for sky distance.
| zola wrote:
| I always translate it in my mind to full moons. 30 arcmin
| == diameter of full moon as seen from earth.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| A minute of arc is one sixtieth of a degree. (A "minute",
| get it?)
|
| The moon is between 29.4 and 33.5 arcminutes wide,
| depending on where it is in its orbit. So about a tenth
| of the width of the moon.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > So about a tenth of the width of the moon.
|
| this is so much more digestible than "grain of sand at
| arm's length", and those two metrics dont feel at all
| equivalent -- the moon is not ten grains of sand at arm's
| length wide, right?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| The moon is pretty darn small. Half a degree wide.
| Imagine gluing ten grains of sand together, balancing it
| on a fingertip, then stretching your arm out. Around a
| degree wide? Depending on your grain of sand, of course.
| leeoniya wrote:
| hmmm, about the size of an asprin tablet or pea at arm's
| length, seems to agree with somewhat smaller than
| thumbnail [1]. maybe i should find and measure some sand
| now :).
|
| in either case, 1/10 the width of the moon is so much
| easier to comprehend. when is the last time anyone tried
| holding a grain of sand at arms length? what a weird
| comparison to make when everyone on earth already has a
| stable/familiar reference in the sky.
|
| [1] https://astronomy.com/magazine/stephen-
| omeara/2010/01/stephe...
| jcims wrote:
| I know that's usually there. I'd just love to see a
| little map scale bar or something in EXIF.
|
| [-----------] deg
|
| [--------] '
|
| [----------------------] "
|
| [----------------] ,,"
|
| Super easy.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| Nice idea, really, and very easy to implement.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Thanks for the direct links!
|
| > Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam Image)
|
| Is this image distorted in any way at all? It feels like the
| galaxies are somehow oriented around a center spot. Not all of
| them, but enough to give the image a distorted feeling.
| Probably it's just my mind pattern matching against something
| that doesn't really exist.
| palmtree3000 wrote:
| Gravitational lensing. From the description[0]:
|
| Other features include the prominent arcs in this field. The
| powerful gravitational field of a galaxy cluster can bend the
| light rays from more distant galaxies behind it, just as a
| magnifying glass bends and warps images. Stars are also
| captured with prominent diffraction spikes, as they appear
| brighter at shorter wavelengths.
|
| [0] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-
| releases/2022/news-2...
| samstave wrote:
| So, would that mean that the gravitational lensing over
| how-ever-many-light-years is ALSO coupled with the
| convex/cave aspect of the pico-adjusting of the JWT 'lens'
| such that even our JWT's pico-adjustments affect the NORMAL
| of the photons to the image?
|
| Can this be adjusted for?
|
| Wouldnt the pico-arc of the overall array affect the image
| output due to the distances involved such that we receive
| "false gravitational lensing, simply based on distance from
| the sensor"
|
| ?
|
| I wonder if a more precise version(s) of the hex lenses
| could be made such that they can 'normal-ize' on a much
| more refined basis.
|
| I know that each JWT is already capable of mico-flexes to
| each cell... but if we can develope an even further
| refinement (Moores law on the JWTs hex lenses resolution)
| we will be able to make thousands of images with varying
| the the normalization to each receiving area and comparing
| image quality.
|
| Also, I am sure there are folks who know the reflective
| characteristics of photons from each wavelength that would
| allow for orientations for each wavelength.
|
| --
|
| Do ALL 'light' wavelengths, particles bounce off the
| reflector materials in the same way? - meaning do infra
| waves/photons bounce in the exact same way as some other
| wavelength with the exact same orientation of the sensor?
|
| ---
|
| Do they do any 'anti-gravitational-lensing' correction
| calcs to 'anti-bend' a photons path to us to 're-normalize'
| the path that we should have seen?
|
| Whats the current science behind such?
| samstave wrote:
| I'm convinced we are receiving "Wobbly Photons"
|
| Meaning that no matter waht, when we speak of
| gravitational lenses, we could, usting JWST account for
| the "wobble" of a photon, nased on the accurate knowledge
| of where a body was, via measuring through multiples of
| JSWT observations... (ideally through actually multiple
| JWSTs, in differnt locations)
|
| The idea being that if we can triangulate a more precice
| location between earth [A] and galaxy [N] - set of all
| galaxies/bodies/whatever,
|
| We may be able to calculate the influence of gravity lens
| upon phont differentials based on when they came from and
| how far...
|
| Ultimately making adjustments to the output of an image
| \based on super deep-field focus which is effectively
| selecting to the phtons of interest... and we can
| basically "carbon date" the accuracy of an image with a
| higher resolution?
| qwertywert_ wrote:
| The gravitational lensing matches exactly how it looked
| in Hubble's deep field overlay, so I would guess no the
| JWST lens is not causing any "false" gravitational
| lensing? If that's what you are asking.
| samstave wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I worded that poorly ;
|
| Wouldn't one be able to adjust the perceived path of the
| photon after time, to adjust for re-normalizing the path
| of the photon based on the understanding of the
| gravitational arc imposed on such -- meaning the astro
| equivalent of "ZOOM. ENHANCE!" :-)
| qwertywert_ wrote:
| Ah right, good question yes it seems like it could be
| possible..
| 8note wrote:
| Depending on the orientation, you wouldn't have the right
| pixels to put for the angle of view from straight on.
|
| Eg, you'd normally see the side view of an object, but
| the lensing gets you the top and bottom views
| april_22 wrote:
| Will the JWST be able to make photos of black holes,
| similar to the ones the EHT made? And if yes, can the JWST
| be used to study black holes?
| nullc wrote:
| Producing an "image" of a black holes requires
| astronomical, ahem, resolution because they're so far
| away (thankfully). To achieve this kind of resolution you
| need an aperture of thousand of kilometers.
|
| The EHT images are created using synthetic aperture
| techniques to create an effective aperture with a
| diameter of earth's orbit around the sun. But this is
| only currently possible at radio frequencies due to our
| ability to capture, store, and coherently combine the
| phase information. It's essentially SDR beam forming
| across space and time.
|
| We can also study black holes though visible and IR
| observations through their effects of the things around
| them-- lensing from their mass, matter heated up by
| falling in. Here is an image I took of the relativistic
| speed matter jet believed to originate from black hole in
| M87: https://nt4tn.net/astro/#M87jet ... and Webb can do
| a lot better than I can with a camera lens in my back
| yard. :)
|
| Aside, there is some controversy about the EHT black hole
| images. A recent paper claims to be able to reproduce the
| ring like images using the EHT's imaging process and a
| simulated point source-- raising the question of the
| entire image just being a processing artifact.
| https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/m87-ring-or-
| arte... Though it's not surprising to see concerns raised
| around cutting edge signal processing-- LIGO suffered
| from a bit of that, for example, but confidence there has
| been improved by a significant number of confirming
| observations (including optical confirmations of ligo
| events).
| april_22 wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Another question: are they already planning a successor
| to JWST? Is something better even possible? If it took
| more than 30 years, we should start sooner than later :)
| btilly wrote:
| The next better thing won't likely take 30 years.
|
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-
| is-st... is correct. No NASA planning, including for
| space telescopes, shows any understanding of how much
| Starship changes the game. Instead of one, we can put up
| a network of telescopes. And try out crazy ideas.
|
| Here is a concrete example. https://www.researchgate.net/
| publication/231032662_A_Cryogen... lays out how a 100
| meter telescope could be erected on the Moon to study the
| early universe with several orders of magnitude better
| resolution than the JWST. The total weight of their
| design is around 8 tons. With traditional NASA
| technologies, transport of the material alone is over $30
| billion and it had better work. With Starship,
| transportation is in the neighborhood of $10 million.
| Suppose that precision equipment added $40 million to the
| cost. Using Starship, for the cost of the JWST, we can
| put 200 missions of this complexity in space. Using a
| variety of different experimental ideas. And if only half
| of them worked, we'd still be 99 telescopes ahead of the
| JWST.
|
| So where is Starship? It is on the pad, undergoing
| testing. They have a list of 75 environmental things to
| take care of before launch. Which means that they likely
| launch this month or next. At the planned construction
| cadence, even if the first 3 blow up, by Christmas it
| should be a proven technology.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_space_obse
| rva...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAFIR is the closest to a
| proposed JWST successor; the others largely serve
| different purposes.
| pja wrote:
| > The EHT images are created using synthetic aperture
| techniques to create an effective aperture with a
| diameter of earth's orbit around the sun.
|
| Small correction: The EHT is a synthetic aperture
| telescope the size of the Earth, not the size of the
| Earth's orbit around the Sun.
|
| Synthetic aperture telescopes need both amplitude & phase
| information from each observing station & have to combine
| the phase of simultaneous observations in order to create
| the final image. We can't do this on the scale of the
| earth's orbit, because we don't have a radio telescope on
| the far side of the sun!
|
| Maybe one day ...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| > "Here is an image I took of the relativistic speed
| matter jet believed to originate from black hole in M87:
| https://nt4tn.net/astro/#M87jet ... and Webb can do a lot
| better than I can with a camera lens in my back yard. :)"
|
| You, sir, have just contributed a prime example of HN
| comments at their best. Your astrophotography is
| outstanding. Thank you for sharing! :)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ah, that makes perfect sense. I guess I should have RTFM
| rather than just gawk at the pictures. Thanks for the ELI5!
| russh wrote:
| Oh, that makes sense. I was wondering about the odd
| shapes.
| coldpie wrote:
| Yes, it is distorted by a gravitational lensing effect of a
| massive galaxy cluster. Each image has a short discussion at
| this link, and a longer discussion linked via "Learn more
| about this image" for even more info:
| https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages
| [deleted]
| bcherry wrote:
| Something missing from this discussion that's worth pointing
| out:
|
| This image shows profound "gravitational lensing", which you
| know. But what you might not know is that is precisely _why_
| they chose to photograph it.
|
| This galaxy cluster (SMACS 0723) may be the most well known
| and powerful gravitational lens we have observed. The
| galaxies shown distorted around the edges are actually behind
| the lens, but are magnified by it. This means we can see even
| farther in this region of space than normal, because we
| compound the power of the JWST with the power of this natural
| lens.
|
| It all adds up to providing the "deepest" view of the
| universe yet, allowing us to see galaxies at a distance of
| more than 13.2B lightyears. This lets us see structures
| formed in the infancy of the universe, that wouldn't be
| possible looking at most other points in the sky, or even
| anywhere else in this deep field besides the perimeter of the
| lens in the middle.
| t9999999999999 wrote:
| The elongated double lensed galaxy to the right of centre
| shows lots of point sources. These look like globular
| clusters or maybe satellite galaxies (maybe these are the
| same thing in the early universe?).
| mrandish wrote:
| Thanks for posting these links! It was frustrating that the
| main NASA PR pages linked photos that were 1280x720. I guess
| that's to protect their bandwidth costs since much of the
| general public is probably viewing on mobile anyway and higher
| res would not only be slower but wasted bits.
|
| I just wish NASA had provided a link at the bottom of their
| low-res image pages to intermediate sized images (~4k) for
| desktop viewing.
| yread wrote:
| you can also download full res (even uncompressed) images
| from ESA site (they developed two of the IR instruments)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Not that I'm complaining since I hate jpeg compression, but
| you'd think that if they were concerned about bandwidth, they
| wouldn't use png...
| epistasis wrote:
| Mobile is actually a great platform to get Hugh resolution,
| since you can zoom in really easily and navigate the full
| image.
|
| However, after spending 10 minutes on mobile this morning, I
| was unable to find any high resolution images, and many
| images had that anti-pattern of a BS HTML gallery that
| severely restricts interacting with the image.
| collaborative wrote:
| Past a certain resolution, mobile devices automatically
| scale down images. This is hard to see in real-world images
| like pictures/galaxies. But try to open a really large
| image with some text in it and you will surely see how the
| text has turned blurry
| coldpie wrote:
| I believe this page has what you want:
| https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages Click on the image,
| twice, to get to a large-but-not-crazy resolution photo.
| j0e1 wrote:
| > "Cosmic Cliffs" in the Carina Nebula (NIRCam Image):
|
| > https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7ETPF7DVBJAC42JR5N6EQRH.png
|
| Is this for real?! It looks like it came right out of a Sci-Fi
| movie/book. Could anyone explain how much of this is post-
| editing magic?
| randyrand wrote:
| Does anyone have a simulated image of what it would look like
| in visible light without red shifting?
|
| i.e. If we were moving at the same velocity of the Nebula
| looking with our own eyes.
|
| i.e. What it would look like "in real life if I actually went
| there"
| yaakov34 wrote:
| These objects are much too faint to see much of anything
| with human eyes. We can see them in astrophotography
| because the exposures are hours long (or weeks even,
| sometimes), and because telescopes gather more light than
| the eye per unit time, as well. This is why these nebulae
| look like billowing clouds - they are huge (light years
| across), so some light is absorbed as it crosses them, and
| some of the infrared light emitted by them adds up. And
| then we enhance the effect by taking very long exposures.
| If we actually went and stood near or even inside these
| nebulae, we would still be in pretty hard interstellar
| vacuum, and we wouldn't see anything.
| randyrand wrote:
| Very nice description. Thanks for your time and effort.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Image stacking to remove noise and optical artifacts, careful
| use of color filters to enhance contrast and pull out detail.
| The press release says it used Red: F444W, Orange: F335M,
| Yellow: F470N, Green: F200W, Cyan: F187N, Blue: F090W. The N
| filters are narrowband. F470N is only 54 nanometers wide:
| https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-
| camera/nircam...
|
| Almost all the light in this image is way off the red end of
| the human visual spectrum, of course. The shortest wavelength
| filter is F090W which has a center wavelength of 902nm, about
| the same color as the light coming out of a TV remote
| infrared LED, which is barely visible in pure darkness.
|
| This is what it looks like through a film SLR, without the
| detail enhancing filters:
| http://www.phys.ttu.edu/~ozprof/3372f.htm Here's a 20 minute
| exposure through a telescope:
| http://www.phys.ttu.edu/~ozprof/3372fk.jpg Maybe what you
| would see with your own eyes through binoculars at a dark
| site well away from city lights. A dim red smudge, hints of
| finer detail.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| How does this "blueshift" compare to what we'd get if we
| just corrected for the relative-speed-induced redshift?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| NGC3372 is inside our galaxy, just 8500 light years away.
| It's not redshifted by metric expansion to any
| appreciable degree, (A calculator I just checked gave me
| a z of 0.000000617) and radial velocity is a sedate ~34
| km/s. (z = 0.000000115)
|
| The redshift on the other JWST images is because most of
| them are of objects that are much, much, much farther
| away. Infrared telescopes are great for observing those,
| but that's not the only thing they're used for.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Maybe my question would be better asked for other objects
| images then, but I can just google how far things are
| redshifted at extreme distances as well.
| ehsankia wrote:
| My understanding is that the IR here is used to see
| "through" the "smoke", so you can see more details that
| would normally be obstructed.
|
| A good way to see this is comparing it to Hubble [1], a
| lot of the extra detail you see is thanks to IR letting
| you see the stars behind.
|
| [1] https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare/
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Understood!
|
| What I was asking is: Is the target's normally-visible
| light redshifted into the same bands that JWST is
| measuring, higher? or lower frequency?
|
| That doesn't have anything to do with why JWST uses IR.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Redshift refers to how the wavelength of a photon can
| change if the observer is moving relative to it, (Doppler
| shift, redshift if you're moving away from the photon,
| blueshift if you're moving towards it) or cosmological
| redshift. (The fabric of the universe expanding, reducing
| photon energy)
|
| NGC3372 is a cloud of (relatively) hot gas and dust. It's
| emitting broad spectrum blackbody radiation: it's
| emitting on all wavelengths. You can look at the same
| cloud at different wavelengths and see different things,
| telling you what parts of the cloud are at what
| temperature, or relative chemical composition, or what
| parts are ionized: http://legacy.spitzer.caltech.edu/uplo
| aded_files/graphics/fu... Nothing here is redshifted,
| Spitzer is just capturing different light entirely.
|
| In the side by side of JWST and Hubble https://pbs.twimg.
| com/media/FXecm6vXwAMPhoc?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs
| .twimg.com/media/FXecnp2XkAE4Rs5?format=jpg&name=... you
| see broadly the same thing, but Hubble is almost all
| visible-light while JWST goes deeper into infrared and
| sees cloud structure that Hubble doesn't.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Much of it is in infrared light we can't see, so it's
| "transposed" to the visible spectrum.
|
| Not much weirder than looking at an X-ray image.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| It's all real, but you would not be able to see it with your
| bare eyes even if you were relatively close to the nebula.
| The world around us would look very different if our eyes
| could perceive more of the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum.
|
| The coloring is usually done to indicate different
| temperatures or wavelengths detected, so it can be a bit
| misleading.
| DougBTX wrote:
| Maybe a similar but different question then, but what would
| a photo on Earth look like with this filter?
| vanattab wrote:
| The color mapping of these images is not the same as the
| what is used for JWST but this will probably give you
| some clue.
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/9gqtdbcsBxY6RonY9
| https://images.app.goo.gl/pG7sfjLGU9nqmAvH7
| https://images.app.goo.gl/JGebDZ7V5EamKoY89
| Retric wrote:
| It's real light, just color shifted as the JWST is designed
| to look at severely very distant and thus red shifted
| objects. The nebula is however much closer than that.
|
| Anyway, that looks like science fiction because science
| fiction borrowed that look from astronomy.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula
| aaroninsf wrote:
| I have been wondering,
|
| how does the scale of color shifting relate to the red-
| shift present in deep-field subject?
|
| Idly wondering: are the furtherest objects being captured,
| so red-shifted, that the translation for human viewing done
| in these images more or less balances that out, so what we
| see in the translated images for some thickness of
| distance-bubble, is what we would see from a much closer
| perspective with the naked eye, akin to "true color." (I.e.
| so close that the relative red-shift would be
| insignificant...)
| ndm000 wrote:
| I know nothing about optics. What is the effect that causes the
| 6 or 8 points of light of come off of bright objects? Does it
| have to do with the hex-shaped mirrors on JWT?
| PavleMiha wrote:
| Yes, and also two of the trusses to the secondary mirror
| (these are the two additional horizontal lines). The Hubble
| Space Telescope gets 4 lines because of its 4 trusses.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Aperture shape, so in this case I guess the answer is yes?
| arianvanp wrote:
| it's called a point spread function; and is an artifact that
| occurs in any mirror telescope. https://bigthink.com/starts-
| with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/ explains it pretty well.
| divbzero wrote:
| Somewhere in one of those distant galaxies, a modestly advanced
| life form has deployed their first infrared telescope into orbit
| around their star system and captured a deep field image that
| happens to contain our Milky Way. Discussions in their hive brain
| include speculation on life existing beyond their star system.
| k4ch0w wrote:
| I'm super proud of all our scientists for this work. It's
| honestly one of the most astounding photos I've ever looked at.
| turdnagel wrote:
| This kind of stuff is really awe-inspiring. I have a couple of
| questions for anyone who is knowledgeable on the subject:
|
| 1. Looking at the light from the tiny red-shifted galaxies that
| are ~13 billion years old... would the Milky Way appear the same
| to an observer ~13 billion ly from us?
|
| 2. What is the cause of the star pointed artifacts (specifically,
| having 6 major "points") for particularly bright objects? If you
| zoom in closely on any one of the points, you can almost make out
| a hex grid, as if the shape of the telescope's mirrors is the
| cause. Is that correct?
| ip26 wrote:
| The points are caused by the support arms of the secondary
| mirror.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| 1. Yes pretty much.
|
| 2. Yes the artifact shape is related to the mirror shape, and
| the support arms which block some light. this is called a
| Diffraction spike. There are a bunch of fake web telescope
| image videos on YouTube with 4pointed diffraction spikes so you
| can tell they are taken from a different telescope.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike
| 12ian34 wrote:
| on 1., I'm not sure but I'd guess so, yes.
|
| on 2., you are seeing Diffraction Spikes[0] which are artefacts
| of the telescope's design.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike
| smm11 wrote:
| This is the point in Contact when the crazy religious guy pushes
| the button.
| smudgy wrote:
| I saw it and I started crying, it's beautiful beyond description
| and belief.
| threads2 wrote:
| hahaha thanks for the laugh
| WebbWeaver wrote:
| I really appreciate the work of the US Air Force Cambridge
| Research Laboratories for creating HITRAN. HITRAN is a molecular
| spectroscopic database used to look molecules in gas and
| atmosphere. They are the standard archive for transmission and
| radiance calculations. Without their groundwork we would not be
| as good at understanding planetary atmospheres.
|
| https://hitran.org/ free after registration
|
| https://hitran.org/media/refs/HITRAN-2020.pdf
|
| HAPI (programming interface manual)
| https://hitran.org/static/hapi/hapi_manual.pdf
|
| Youtube tutorials
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiKuigtFahk&list=PLqOG3cBizT...
|
| It is very easy to use and might help to understand WASP-96 b
| transmission spectrum. https://stsci-
| opo.org/STScI-01G7NBXDHYYSVBP2M476PRGG3A.png
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_...
| WebbWeaver wrote:
| Aww yiss new images! Extremely generous analysis and 3d
| orientation.
|
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G...
|
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G...
|
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/035/01G...
|
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G...
| grendelt wrote:
| looks like they changed the lensflare from 4 points to 6... a 50%
| increase!
| NeutralForest wrote:
| Absolutely breathtaking that such a tiny window inside the
| universe would cover so much.
| adonovan wrote:
| It always blows my mind that when you look at the night sky,
| aside from 7 planets and only 2 galaxies, every point of light
| you see is a star; but when these space telescopes point at a
| patch of nothingness, we see a starry night where every point
| of light is a (freaking) galaxy.
| anewpersonality wrote:
| Dumb question. Why can't we focus on a single exoplanet, look for
| mountains, grass, buildings?
|
| Why am I so stupid but isn't this the obvious thing to do?
| sephamorr wrote:
| There is a fundamental physics limit at play here: the
| diffraction limit is linear with the aperture diameter and
| gives an upper bound on the resolution of a telescope. Having a
| longer exposure doesn't help - that's for resolving very faint
| objects (more light collected -> higher signal-to-noise). To
| resolve a building-sized object on an exoplanet, regardless of
| its intensity, we'd need a telescope the size of the solar
| system. There are some proposals to use the gravitational
| lensing of our sun to create such a telescope, but those
| projects are decades at least from implementation.
| anewpersonality wrote:
| This is a good answer, though incredibly depressing
| m0giddo wrote:
| Here's an example of one of the proposals:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft)
| dougmwne wrote:
| It's because those planets are incredibly far away. The
| distance is so huge, there is no way to even picture it. It
| would be a single pixel on any telescope we could conceivably
| build. What we can do though is measure the chemical
| composition of their atmospheres. This could be very
| interesting if we found some hallmarks of life on a rocky
| planet.
| worker_person wrote:
| Need a really big mirror, like size of planet to start with.
|
| Another neat idea is to use the Sun as a gravitational lens.
| But you you would need it put it way past Pluto to get proper
| focus. So maybe another hundred years to get tech and resources
| to that point.
|
| https://www.space.com/earth-like-exoplanet-imaging-with-sun
| whatshisface wrote:
| There aren't telescopes big enough to do that.
| anewpersonality wrote:
| capableweb wrote:
| > Seeing a bunch of pretty nebulae with artificial colorimg
| is no longer inspiring, it looks like it could have come
| out of DALL-E
|
| Yeah, that's totally how science works!
|
| You can't confirm/reject any theories based on pictures
| that a AI generates, but I guess you'll tell me that "sure
| we can" with some more hyperbole.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| If you're not inspired by these images and the accompanying
| detail on why they are being taken (especially the
| exoplanet spectroscopic surveys) then you just aren't
| thinking hard enough about them.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We can, and do. They're so far away that even our largest
| telescopes see only a few pixels.
|
| Examples:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exoplane...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beta_Pictoris_b_in_Motion...
|
| When Hubble looked at Pluto, it was a low-detail blur ("The
| Hubble raw images are a few pixels wide"), and that's _within
| our solar system_. https://esahubble.org/images/opo1006h/
|
| Remember, the first exoplanet was detected in 1992, and not by
| imaging; prior to that we didn't even know if they existed at
| all. JWST's planning started in 1996.
| pkaye wrote:
| How much details we can see if based on the wavelength of light
| and the diameter of the telescope. And if you worked it out,
| the telescope diameter would have to be enormous.
|
| https://calculator.academy/diffraction-limit-calculator/#f1p...
|
| However gravity can bend light so there is some thought of
| using the sun as a lens. However the observation would have to
| be pretty far away from our sun so its just wishful thinking in
| our lifetime.
|
| https://www.freethink.com/space/gravity-telescope
|
| For now the best we will have to see a dot on image via
| coronagraphy and maybe understand more about the exoplanet
| through spectroscopy.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Maybe the link changed, but the 5th link down the page, "July
| 12, 2022 Release ID: 2022-032", is "Webb Reveals Steamy
| Atmosphere of Distant Planet in Exquisite Detail ", link is
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2...
| anewpersonality wrote:
| Thats a spectograph
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yes, and if we do a spectral analysis on a small rocky
| exoplanet and find a bunch of oxygen, that tells us a lot
| more exciting information than the 2x2 pixels you might get
| from an image of it.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Way to brighten my day with awe and wonder, way to ruin my day
| with existential dread about our place in the universe.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Existential dread pro-tip: The Wikipedia page on "Ultimate fate
| of the universe" is a fantastic way to compell the question of
| why anything ultimately matters.
|
| Coming up with personal answers to this is the ultimate
| character resolve exercise!
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| See also "Ask HN: What's the point of life?"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866558
| yreg wrote:
| I found Kurzgesagt's video on Optimistic Nihilism helpful.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14
| Agamus wrote:
| Awesome link, thank you. Nietzsche's career was an exercise
| in creating and promoting the concept of 'creative
| nihilism' as an alternative to existential pessimism, which
| works for me!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Nothing matters. You live for a while and then you die, but
| it sure can be a cool trip getting there!
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Do you feel that way about your family members? Your
| spouse? Your children? They don't matter?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It's important to differentiate between things that
| matter to my emotional well being and things that
| _matter_ in a universal sense. Plenty of things matter to
| my personal monkeybrain - I want to have a stockpile of
| nutritious, calorie dense foods. I want to feel free of
| danger from predators and natural hazards, I want members
| of my tribe to prosper and multiply, etc. All those
| things might as well be noise on the universal scale.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Yes. By induction, if nothing matters, then they don't
| matter either.
|
| It helps you relax and put things in perspective. For
| example, you can focus on achieving high scores just for
| the sake of it. Have the kids you want, have the life you
| want, have the things you want, knowing that it's
| pointless but that you want it and that's enough.
| zaarn wrote:
| Why does valuing the journey mean you don't value other
| people?
| silvi9 wrote:
| You think nothing matters? How can you be so sure?
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I'm not sure that matters, does it?
| glitcher wrote:
| Nothing and Everything matters simultaneously, reality is
| the ultimate paradox :)
| ckosidows wrote:
| "Life is all about you and not at all about you" -ZHU
| abrenuntio wrote:
| The theist gets a sense of the greatness of God. The
| atheist concludes his own insignificance.
| mkeedlinger wrote:
| Indeed, it is truly cause to pause and step back. What's the
| name of that phenomenon common amongst astronauts when they see
| the earth from afar? I feel like our society could use more of
| that.
|
| edit: Seems to be called the overview effect [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect
| noneeeed wrote:
| One of my favourite concepts from Douglas Adams was the Total
| Perspective Vortex, a form of punishment that would drive the
| victim insane by showing them the entire totality of existence
| and their place in it.
| _moof wrote:
| Didn't work on Zaphod though. He just ate the cake.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The simulated cake. It was in a universe simulation created
| for him.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Wow. That's genius
| teh_klev wrote:
| It's like looking into the Total Perspective Vortex.
| leeoniya wrote:
| it's terrifying how alone and ephemeral we truly are, that
| there are already places in our expanding universe that will
| never be reachable even via communication with any technology
| on any time scale (unless universe expansion reverses course).
| that any communication we may receive today will be from
| civilizations that have ceased to exist thousands to billions
| of years ago. and humans will likely never travel outside the
| solar system.
|
| consciousness is a hell of a drug
| HKH2 wrote:
| It seems more like the fear of missing out. I don't feel
| terrified at all.
| layer8 wrote:
| You're aware that this is just the observable universe? It may
| be completely irrelevant relative to the total universe. ;)
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Why existential dread? We're extremely lucky to be alive. That
| one sperm hit that one egg and we survived to now. That is
| extremely unlucky, each of us is one sperm out of hundreds of
| millions, so savor this existence!!
| aruanavekar wrote:
| Great pictures
| https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2022/07/12/11110028...
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Other than the big bright ones (which I guess are nearby stars)
| are all these things different galaxies?
| perlgeek wrote:
| Yes.
|
| This was an image of a relatively "empty" portion of sky (no
| stars nearby), so anything you can see has to be pretty bright
| by itself, which means galaxy, not star.
| pqdbr wrote:
| Does that also include the very tiny little dots? I have the
| same question as OP, and I thought the tiny dots were single
| stars, and the little bigger ones (brighter) were galaxies.
| alberth wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most astronomy photos
| colorized (and not actually such vivid colors in real life).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Absolutely, these objects would be completely invisible when
| using visible light so it is all false color, just like a FLIR
| would show you an image of the infra red light emitted by an
| object by shifting it to a spectrum that you can directly
| perceive.
| bognition wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The photon collectors on JWT detect infra red which is not
| visible to humans.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Yes. Or rather, it's a color palette mapping whatever range of
| the EM spectrum the image is gathered with to something we
| humans can see.
|
| And yes, sometimes the mapping is done to make things look
| nice.
| deanCommie wrote:
| What is real life? What are vivid colors?
|
| All electromagnetic radiation is the same. In the sense that
| every proton/neutron is the same. But adding a few more
| protons/neutrons creates an entirely new element, with entirely
| new chemical properties. From something simple come incredibly
| new powerful behaviours. So just as Iron is massively different
| from Plutonium, Microwaves are massively different from Gamma
| rays.
|
| What we call "colors", or "visible light" is not particularly
| special, except to us, and our specific human biology. It feels
| more real because it's visible to us, but it's not on the grand
| scale of the universe.
|
| What we're observing through these telescopes isn't a dog
| chasing a ball. We're seeing stuff billions of light years
| away, millions of light years in size, billions of years ago.
| Passing by trillions of other stars and planets on the way.
|
| These objects are emitting a gargantuan amount of information.
| Why should we only present the information that happens to be
| in the same subset as what our primitive primate vision cones
| can process?
|
| So, no, if you were to teleport to the nebula/galaxy that we're
| showing images for, it wouldn't look exactly like that to your
| human eyes. Instead, what you're seeing is what a god with
| perfect vision of the universe would see. You're seeing the
| universe for what it is, not just the part of it that is
| presented to humans.
| jonplackett wrote:
| It would be great if they did a before and after shot.
|
| Like, here's what we could see at this point in space before. Now
| we can see... THIS!
| deelowe wrote:
| https://petapixel.com/2022/07/11/comparing-hubble-to-james-w...
| capableweb wrote:
| Yeah, that's not very good implementation. PetaPixel usually
| have good content, but using a GIF to compare these two
| images? Come on! You can see the compression artifacts very
| easily.
| deelowe wrote:
| This was also recently posted on reddit:
| https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare/
| jonplackett wrote:
| Was J J Abrahams involved in Webb, because it really
| seems to produce nice lens flair
| capableweb wrote:
| What you're seeing is not _lens flares_ but _diffraction
| spikes_. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike
|
| You could call those lens flares I guess, but commonly
| known as diffraction spikes when it comes to telescopes.
| In this case they appear because of the supporting struts
| in the James Webb telescope.
| HedgeGriffon wrote:
| Umm.. not compression artifacts. GIF uses lossless LZW.
| Maybe color palette artifacts since GIFs are usually
| palettized and not true color (although with a tortured use
| of local color tables they can even be true color)
| capableweb wrote:
| This is the nitpick we all come here for :)
|
| Choosing a limited palette in order to save bytes, some
| might say is compression. If said compression hurts the
| image quality, some might call that "compression
| artifacts".
|
| The point stands, GIF was a poor choice for the format
| here.
| yreg wrote:
| How about this one, by a user from here?
|
| https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/
| boriskourt wrote:
| This is a great way to show all the new distant details.
| Amazing to think that so many of the artifacts in
| Hubble's total darkness are galaxies upon galaxies.
| historynops wrote:
| A lot of the pictures have some bright stars with 6 long lens
| flare like points coming out of them in a consistent pattern. Is
| that because of the hexagonal shape of JWT's lenses/mirrors?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not the mirrors, it's the three struts supporting the
| reflector.
|
| Hubble shows four spikes because it has two struts.
|
| https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/
|
| https://www.universetoday.com/155062/wondering-about-the-6-r...
| krajzeg wrote:
| I think you also had a similar comment and linked the same
| article under the previous topic about JWST's first image?
|
| The article is very informative, but my read of it is
| different: the three major "spikes" are in fact due to the
| hexagonal shape of the mirrors and how they're laid out. The
| struts also add three spikes, but: two of them coincide with
| the mirror spikes, while one of them (from the vertical
| strut) is visible on its own, and causes the smaller
| perfectly horizontal spike.
|
| The image I'm basing this on is in your article with a
| caption starting from "The point spread function for the
| James Webb Space Telescope" [1]
|
| [1]: https://bigthink.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/03/FOFC8ZPX0AIB...
| deanCommie wrote:
| From the other comments, I understand why it's there, but i
| wish they would photoshop them out.
|
| The images take on a more synthetic and fake quality when the
| technical physical man-made constraints of our telescope get
| projected out onto the natural very much NON-man-made universe.
|
| Look at https://stsci-
| opo.org/STScI-01G7ETPF7DVBJAC42JR5N6EQRH.png and observe the
| incredible entropy in the nebula itself. The consistent,
| perfect, straight lines, of each star are jarring in the image.
| deanCommie wrote:
| to be clear - i realize these are for science. they shouldn't
| be edited for scientists.
|
| but we should edit them :)
| rbliss wrote:
| Yes, it's a combination of both the primary mirror and struts.
| The JWST website has a very helpful infographic explaining:
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7...
| coldpie wrote:
| Wow, thanks for this link. The level of communication around
| JWST's technology and launch has been amazing, and this is a
| great example of that.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's quite exhaustive, but it makes me wonder why isn't
| anything done to correct for that. Like for example instead
| of taking one 15h exposure, why not take three 5h exposures
| and roll the telescope 5 degrees in between, then median
| filter out the artefacts?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| JWST does have a roll dither mode: https://jwst-
| docs.stsci.edu/jwst-general-support/jwst-dither... Don't
| know why they didn't use it. Maybe they were trying to
| observe as many targets as possible for the initial release
| of imagery.
| AnonMO wrote:
| It took like 5 months to cool web to operational
| temperatures rolling the telescope would create so much
| heat all new images would be useless until it cools down
| again.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That makes no sense, they have to rotate it every time
| they take a picture otherwise they'd be looking at the
| same spot all the time. Motors don't emit that much heat
| and neither do torque wheels.
|
| Though I suppose now that I think of it, it's possible
| the main mirror assembly actually has no built in roll
| control but only pitch, since the yaw part could be done
| by moving the entire telescope while remaining shaded.
| I've never seen any videos showing the full movement, but
| the previews for LUVIOR show it having full 3 degree
| articulation relative to the heatsink segment, so I
| assumed the Webb also has it given that they're extremely
| similar designs.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzFEaCYhmEs
| AnonMO wrote:
| LUVIOR is not web. Web doesn't have articulation like
| LUVIOR its fixed only the mirror segements move. also
| they don't rorate everytime they take a picture there's
| limitations beacuse its an infered telescope.
| https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-observatory-
| characteristics.... Web also has a field of view 15x
| hubble
| MontagFTB wrote:
| You beat me to it- incredibly helpful diagram. Thanks for
| sharing it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Also, I recall reading that those stars are so bright because
| they're within our galaxy... so they're the foreground really
| deelowe wrote:
| More or less. That's how they've explained it in the past.
| MontagFTB wrote:
| Here's an infographic from NASA explaining the phenomenon:
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7...
| mackieem wrote:
| Yeah, it's the hexagonal shape. The objects with the 6
| diffraction spikes are overexposed compared to the rest of the
| objects in the picture, so they're generally brighter and/or
| closer objects.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBcc3vpJTAU
| sk8terboi wrote:
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Watching the livestream i was more than surprised, that color
| correction actually happens in Photoshop.
|
| Also, there seem to be multiple layer-masks involved for specific
| regions and objects.
|
| I get that you can shift and composite color, based on hue, apply
| filters etc, but: Photoshop?
|
| Curious if anyone can explain, that what we see is actual science
| or some touched up version of objects in our universe.
|
| p.s.: What struck me the most is the absence of noise, especially
| for the deep field photo. Hubble took many exposures over weeks,
| which normally would allow for reliable reduction of noise, webb
| took some shots over the course of hours and there's hardly any
| noise to see. Weirdest part is seeing them just "healing
| brushing" away some dots - how is the decision process on
| altering images like that?
|
| (edit for typos)
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think you've answered your own question there, it's just PR
| images touched up by the media team without regard for
| anything. If there's any science being done it'll be done by
| matlab scripts using raw data as input.
| dmead wrote:
| amateur astronomer here.
| (https://www.instagram.com/mead_observatory/)
|
| 1. photoshop is really good at composing different (spectral)
| layers together. There is alternatives to this like pixinight
| that are more geared toward deep sky astronomy work but I'm
| sure it's easier to hire people that can just take a Photoshop
| class.
|
| there are many layers/masks involved for different filters. the
| filters accept or reject certain wavelengths of light and may
| be designed for specific elements on the periodic table. people
| often talk about hydrogen filters or oxygen filters, sulfer
| filters etc. the color distinction you see is actually
| indicating elemental composition much of the time. I'm not sure
| what filters webb is using.
|
| 2. modern telescopes clean up their images by taking a "master
| dark frame" that is a stacked frame of many frames taken with
| the lens cap on. The goal there is to compute the noise profile
| of the sensor. I'm sure before launch the darks for the sensors
| were determined and are at the ready to correct and calibrate
| images coming from the telescope. think of it as applying a
| bespoke noise filter for that sensor. It's a fast process to
| apply it, but not to generate it. If they really make the raws
| available I'm sure we'll see more noise there.
|
| 3. the touch up you see them doing is the removal of a hot
| pixel which survived the calibration process with the dark
| frame. no doubt on space telescopes they still get errant hot
| pixel of some kind of particle or cosmic ray they don't want
| makes it to the sensor and flips a bit (and is therefore not
| account for in the master dark). happens all the time. they're
| probably keeping a map of where they're getting hot pixels.
| buildbot wrote:
| To point 3, they are absolutely keeping many, many maps of
| the pixels and dark current for all of their sensors - this
| is a good picture of the process for a standard astronomical
| CCD: https://cdn.nightskypix.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/calib...
| dmead wrote:
| which reminds me, i need to update my dark library and get
| a light for flats.
| willis936 wrote:
| Thanks for 3. Without the explanation it really did come off
| as doctoring data to be more artistic.
| dmead wrote:
| But they are doctoring it to make it more
| artistic/presentable. I have no doubt that real astronomy
| presentations/papers want to see the undoctored data at
| some point.
|
| Did you mean you thought they were adjusting the content
| and not just fixing noise?
| jacquesm wrote:
| The difference between 'actual science' and 'some touched up
| version of objects in our universe' is smaller than you might
| think: no matter how good your eyes, if there was no frequency
| shift involved you would not be able to perceive the image,
| other than as an array of numbers. To facilitate your
| consumption of the data it _has_ to be frequency shifted and
| the easiest way to do this is to map the IR intensity to a
| range of colors that are graded the same way we grade false
| color images from other sources: higher intensities get
| brighter colors and lower intensities darker colors. Because
| not all of these are equally pleasing to the eye and /or
| enlightening Photoshop is actually a pretty good choice because
| it allows for dynamic experimentation what brings out the
| various details in the best way.
|
| If you would rather stare at an array of numbers or a non
| colorized version (black-and-white) it would be _much_ harder
| to make out the various features.
|
| So think of it as a visual aid, rather than an arts project or
| a way to falsify the data: the colorization is part of the
| science, specifically: how to present the data best.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| What would these look like, if you could point a ground
| telescope at the exact same spot? How much light is in the
| visible spectrum?
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| Here's a Hubble-based nebula that was imaged in both
| infrared and visible.
|
| https://esahubble.org/images/heic1406c/
| jacquesm wrote:
| Great example!
| kache_ wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. IMO: Close enough, and good
| enough :)
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Thanks, but how is the sausage made then?
|
| Guess, that's my main question.
|
| I get that the aquired data needs to be transformed in a way
| so we get an image that depicts a reality we can visually
| process.
|
| I honestly thought there's some tools in Nasa's imaging group
| that, based on scientific rules, pumps out an image that is
| correct - seeing Photoshop in use left me wonder...
|
| I get that the investment needs to be "sold" too, would be
| sad though if we reached fashion-ad conduct for science...
|
| And don't get me wrong: I am in awe and more than happy this
| thing finally gets put to use.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| There is no "correct" when you are shifting images from
| infrared to visible. But the "real science" part is
| probably done with a perceptually uniform color map. Or in
| the many cases where the image we see is actually a
| composite of many images taken with the narrow-band IR
| filter at different central wavelengths, the image might be
| presented with gaussians of different color corresponding
| to the different wavelength images. Or each wavelength is
| considered separately.
| sandgiant wrote:
| This is manly a demonstration of the imaging capabilities
| of JWST. Making actual sausage is a way longer, way more
| boring process.
|
| It depends on the science of course, but generally the
| sausage is made with specialized software that produces
| contour plots with error bars and what-have-you. The actual
| calculations will be done using just numbers, fitting
| models to data without any pretty pictures at all.
|
| This likely wouldn't have made #1 on HN without "pretty
| pictures" (this is what astronomers calls them). Photoshop
| is made for pretty pictures so it would be silly _not_ to
| use it. :)
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >so we get an image that depicts a reality we can visually
| process
|
| Since we can't visually process spectrums other than
| visible, there's no "correct" way to show the image.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I don't think there's a scientific definition of "correct"
| for these sorts of images. How would you even define
| correctness?
| whiteboardr wrote:
| I might be wrong but in theory you know/see what elements
| are involved and burned in observed objects.
|
| Based on their distance, hence blue-/redshift, you could
| at least predict the visible colors we might perceive.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Thanks, but how is the sausage made then?
|
| I can't tell you because I wasn't looking over the shoulder
| of whoever made the image, but at a guess they started off
| from a black and white image, then turned it into an RGB
| image and change the various hues until relevant details
| became easier to see. The reason that that works is because
| a large scale structure has areas that emit at roughly the
| same intensity so you can bring these out by colorizing
| such a range with a gradient around a single hue.
|
| This is not an automated process because a computer would
| not know what we humans find 'interesting structures', if
| you could put that into some form of definition then you
| might be able to automate the process in the same way that
| black-and-white images are automatically colorized (which
| works, but which is sometimes hilariously wrong).
|
| As for the sausage, how it is made is interesting, how it
| tastes is from a PR perspective probably more interesting.
| And regardless you could argue that anything that differs
| from an utterly black square is 'not truthful'.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Because light red shifts over time/expansion, you could
| color these towards blue until they cover parts of the
| human vision space to what they would look like on earth a
| billion years ago or so.
|
| In that case you could render the image differently
| depending on how many millions of years in the past you
| were interested in.
|
| I.e these used to be human "visible" on earth, but
| eventually their colors shifted beyond what we can perceive
| with our eyes.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Many of these images are close and not redshifted.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| No, there's none of that. These pictures aren't being used
| for any kind of science. They're 100% PR pieces, made to
| look pretty - which is fine!
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I like to think that these cosmological structures are
| inherently beautiful the same way abstract mathematics
| is, and colorizing it is just a way to convey a sense of
| that beauty to most people who don't speak the language.
| april_22 wrote:
| Which makes me wonder how all these galaxies and nebulas
| would look like in real life. Would they look similar to
| how they colored it? Are those images maybe potraying a
| completely wrong reality?
| wthomp wrote:
| If you were to fly into these nebula in some kind of
| spaceship they wouldn't be any brighter than they appear
| in the night sky from Earth. They would just look way way
| bigger. The frustrating thing is that our eyes start to
| respond differently to colours when the light is really
| really faint. So we would probably perceive them as a
| grayish green haze. If the image was brightened
| artificiallythen we would see it as mostly red, with some
| browns and blues.
| [deleted]
| roywiggins wrote:
| You can see different images of the Horsehead nebula and
| the differences in how colors are presented. They vary
| substantially, but not in any way that matters, at least
| to me on an aesthetic level. It's more like the
| difference between different white balances (which are,
| to some extent and in some contexts, arbitrary) in a
| terrestrial image.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsehead_Nebula
|
| Maybe one or another of them is more "true to life" but
| since human eyes never evolved to view this stuff,
| there's no reason to think that the best and most
| informative view of an astronomical object is the visible
| light one.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Depends quite a lot on _how_ you look.
|
| If you use an optical telescope to look at the Orion
| Nebula, you'll see it, but it'll appear pretty much grey.
| (No scope and it'll be what looks like a bright star,
| with perhaps a little bit of a blobby nature.) Hook a
| standard SLR camera up to the telescope and do a long
| exposure, though, and the reds and blues become readily
| apparent.
|
| Here's one I took with a standard camera and a 6" scope:
| https://www.instagram.com/p/CMtHMicBwvI/
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Responses to this question are really interesting. I
| usually take these kinds of evasive non answers in bad
| faith, thinking that people are refusing to acknowledge
| the validity of the question.
|
| After some thought, I wonder if it is more an issue of
| neurodiversity. Perhaps some people cant imagine
| themselves viewing a celestial object, or can't imagine
| the desire to do so.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There is no "in real life." The size, sensitivity, and
| spectral response of human eyes is a response to the
| radiation conditions on Earth, as enhanced by evolution.
|
| If the Sun had been redder or bluer and your eyes were
| the size of your head or much smaller, everything would
| look very different.
|
| The Webb images are infrared so "in real life" you'd
| never see them as shown here. You'd see whatever was
| visible in optical wavelengths.
|
| This isn't just a quantitative difference. Those science
| fiction imagined alien worlds covered in little tiny
| technological lights - just like Earth - are a fantasy.
| Aliens might see UV instead of optical frequencies, and
| Earth would look like Venus to them - an opaque planet
| covered by a thick haze. They might light their spaces
| with UV, which we wouldn't be able to see so their planet
| would look dark to us.
|
| And so on.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You are obviously missing the point. They want to know
| what it would look like to a human observer.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's the wrong question to ask because a 'human observer'
| would see absolutely nothing. The age of the objects you
| are looking at is such that you are looking into the past
| not at something the is still there in the present, so if
| we were to transport you there you would not recognize
| the various objects in visible light at all, too much
| time has passed.
|
| At this level 'distance' = 'time'.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >a 'human observer' would see absolutely nothing
|
| Although the accuracy of infrared, or other non-visible
| spectrum digital representations, could be disputed you
| would definitely see something similar in visible
| spectrum as compared to infrared, but with much more
| dust. Most objects that are emitting energy are doing so
| in many portions of the spectrum.
|
| See this example: https://esahubble.org/images/heic1406c/
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| This isn't true at all, many of the objects are not far
| away.
|
| The Carina Nebula (imaged) is 7,500 light years away. It
| is still there.
|
| It seems like people are going through mental gymnastics
| to avoid answering the question. If someone asked what a
| famous black and white photo like _raising the flag_
| would look like in person, would people give the same
| nonsense answers? e.g. "There is no "in real life", "the
| past cant be seen"
|
| For the Carina Nebula[2] :
|
| "Several filters were used to sample narrow and broad
| wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning
| different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale)
| image associated with an individual filter. In this case,
| the assigned colors are: Red: F444W, Orange: F335M,
| Yellow: F470N, Green: F200W, Cyan: F187N, Blue: F090W"
|
| This is in comparison to the human eye, which sees 630 nm
| for red, 532 nm for green, and 465 nm for blue light.
|
| That is not to say the Nebula isn't also observable in
| visible light, you would just be seeing different colors
| and perhaps features. probably something like this
| visible spectrum imagine of a different part of the
| nebula
|
| For the other images, what you would see in person ranges
| from very similar to nothing depending on the image, and
| pixel in the image.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Flag_on_Iwo
| _Jima
|
| [2] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/
| 031/01G...
|
| [3] https://esahubble.org/images/heic0910e/
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, you're right, for that particular nebula. Of course
| there are other nearby objects that are interesting in
| that spectral range. But MIRI really shines when it comes
| to distant galaxies whose light is so far redshifted that
| it shows up as deep infrared.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yes, but even then you can answer the question of what it
| would look like to the human eye if transported closer
| and/or back in time.
|
| They would look different, have different colors and
| features. Galaxies would look more like andromeda as
| viewed via telescope.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What I wouldn't give for a first person view from a
| planet around a double star... oh well.
| Bud wrote:
| Whose real life? Some of the aliens can see better than
| us. ;)
| pkaye wrote:
| They do have some custom tools that are publicly available.
| I saw some videos in the past showing how they use those
| tools along with Photoshop to process images.
| dguest wrote:
| As others have hinted, the real science is going to be less
| pretty.
|
| For example, some algorithm might filter the raw images and
| extract objects matching some properties, fit them, and
| then run every reasonable manipulation of that filter to
| give the fit an error bar. Or they will compare spectra
| from many galaxies to understand their composition, again
| running every reasonable variation of the calculation to
| get some kind of uncertainty.
|
| The end science result will be a graph of some kind in a
| paper, but it costs very little extra to make these
| beautiful images on the side.
| clint wrote:
| Photoshop is literally just a matrix transformation engine
| for data that is highly optimized for ease of use,
| extensibility, and making visual representations of that
| data.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| I'm confused.. why would we expect some other image processing
| software to be better than Photoshop - a software package which
| has been the top of its class for ~30 years?
| [deleted]
| yread wrote:
| Can it even open FITS?
| clint wrote:
| Yes.
| https://esahubble.org/projects/fits_liberator/download_v23/
| randyrand wrote:
| Because photoshop it not open source, not verifiable, and not
| documented on a scientific level about how its filters
| behave.
| Hadriel wrote:
| Eh, it's been pretty tested. Any person can easily apply
| filters and verify the change in image properties and see
| how filters behave.
| c048 wrote:
| Why would they worry about that? These colored images
| aren't used for science, they're meant for marketing.
| ashes-of-sol wrote:
| MAGZine wrote:
| They're not doing science with photoshop. They're creating
| assets for consumption by the public.
| beowulfey wrote:
| I work with images on the other end of the scale regularly, and
| amongst scientists it's probably 50:50 Photoshop or ImageJ for
| editing images like that.
| yread wrote:
| I would have expected ImageJ has plugins better suited to work
| on science
| clint wrote:
| Why would you assume this?
| yread wrote:
| I work in microscopy and everyone uses it. Precise work
| with LUTs, images with z-,c- and t- dimensions, image
| formats, api, ...
| djfobbz wrote:
| I was wondering the same...why not also share the boring
| originals that we can process through our own filters?
| _justinfunk wrote:
| https://mast.stsci.edu/api/v0/index.html
|
| Here's the API to access the boring original data.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > actual science or some touched up version of objects in our
| universe.
|
| Here's a mental model that I found particularly beneficial:
|
| All electromagnetic radiation is the same. In the sense that
| every proton/neutron is the same. But adding a few more
| protons/neutrons creates an entirely new element, with entirely
| new chemical properties. From something simple come incredibly
| new powerful behaviours. So just as Iron is massively different
| from Plutonium, Microwaves are massively different from Gamma
| rays.
|
| What we call "visible light" is not particularly special,
| except to us, and our _specific_ human biology. It feels more
| real because it 's visible to us, but it's not on the grand
| scale of the universe.
|
| What we're observing through these telescopes isn't a dog
| chasing a ball. We're seeing stuff billions of light years
| away, millions of light years in size, billions of years ago.
| Passing by trillions of other stars and planets on the way.
|
| These objects are emitting a gargantuan amount of information.
| Why should we only present the information that happens to be
| in the same subset as what our primitive primate vision cones
| can process?
|
| So, no, if you were to teleport to the nebula/galaxy that we're
| showing images for, it wouldn't look exactly like that to your
| human eyes. Instead, what you're seeing is what a god with
| perfect vision of the universe would see. You're seeing the
| universe for what it is, not just the part of it that is
| presented to humans.
| penneyd wrote:
| Very nicely stated.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I am not doing astronomy but Photoshop is useful to analyze any
| kind of image. You can manipulate contrast, apply all sorts of
| filters, map a color palette, etc... All that using a user-
| friendly interface. It is very mature software used by millions
| of people, for general purpose image work, no custom tool will
| come close.
|
| I guess that scientists will also use specialized software for
| fine analysis, but it doesn't make Photoshop useless.
| amelius wrote:
| I'd recommend Fiji; it was developed within a scientific
| environment; and it is free (unlike PhotoShop).
| Paddywack wrote:
| I read a detailed interview with the person who does the
| enhancements a couple of days ago (can't recall where a grrr).
|
| He said: A) there are two of them in the team doing the imaging
| B) it doesn't start with an image - it's literally heaps of
| binary data that the scientists stitch together C) he then does
| the colour overlay based on agreed norms (one colour per input
| frequency for consistency) D) most of his "touch up" work is
| getting the colour gradient right between the brightest and
| dimmer objects - without this a lot of resolution would be lost
| (brights too bright, or dim not visible).
|
| Hope this helps...
| roywiggins wrote:
| Webb's primary camera is infrared, so there is by necessity a
| choice to be made with how to present the data for humans who
| can't see in infrared.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| I am aware.
|
| (And have been eagerly waiting for this moment for ages)
|
| It just seems "unscientific" to just use Photoshop and above
| all curious about the set of rules and algorithms, that
| enables them to decide which hue to pick for which region,
| levels, etc.
| mrandish wrote:
| While Photoshop is widely used in artistic and creative
| imaging, it also contains a powerful suite of tools for
| image processing in arbitrary color spaces. I'm not even a
| serious user and across various hobby projects I've used it
| for stuff like manipulating 3D depth data and deriving
| logical bit masks.
|
| Photoshop can do just about anything with spatial image
| data and if it's not built-in, you can probably find a
| plug-in to do what you want or write a script. The trade-
| off is the software can be very complex because over the
| decades it's grown to support an incredible number of use
| cases.
|
| Over the years I've also seen PS used in unexpected ways at
| work. If you need to do something programmatic to image or
| spatial data, PS is a good host platform for custom code
| because it will handle importing file formats, color space
| conversion, bit plane manipulation, alignment, scaling,
| cropping, perspective correction and masking before your
| custom processing and then it'll export the output in
| whatever sizes and formats you need. And it will do it on
| gigapixel data sets under script control. That's a lot of
| grunt work you don't have to implement. I've even seen it
| wired up to Matlab.
| irrational wrote:
| What tool would you expect them to use instead of
| Photoshop?
| tsbertalan wrote:
| NumPy or Matlab. And it's possible the "original image"
| is multispectral (more than 3 channels), so you need to
| choose an arbitrary 3-channel projection.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Photoshop is actually more complex than the JWST itself.
| What makes it "unscientific"? The fact that it's a consumer
| product?
| [deleted]
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Not just in astronomy but also in biology, pretty much
| anyone working with images uses photoshop at least for the
| final layout. In biology where the rgb overlay is paramount
| for result interpretation, generally it's frowned upon to
| play with channels too much.
|
| But when you have 10k x 5k pixel images and channels that
| don't directly correlate with visual spectrum I don't see
| why using photoshop extensively is wrong especially for
| images to be released to the general public. I'm even sure
| some local touch up is acceptable for me.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| The person seen photoshopping very briefly talked about how
| he picks different colours for different region/light-
| frequency. But yes, more details will definitely be
| helpful. Also I guess they could open-source the untouched
| photos for other artists and photoshop experts to play
| around?
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| They aren't "untouched photos" in any traditional sense,
| but rather raw data. To visualize astronomical phenomena
| always requires processing/compositing. For that matter,
| traditional cameras on earth automate many of the same
| tasks being done here in Photoshop via debayering.
| roywiggins wrote:
| They did with Hubble:
|
| https://hla.stsci.edu/
|
| This article goes through processing a Hubble image of
| one of the same objects that Webb did today and includes
| an example of what it looks like before adjusting for
| contrast and tone.
|
| https://www.rocketstem.org/2015/04/20/how-astronomers-
| proces...
| pkaye wrote:
| All the untouched images will be available in the MAST
| archives which is where the Hubble data is also
| available. (https://archive.stsci.edu/)
| dguest wrote:
| Everything will be public eventually.
|
| There's a bit on the data policy on wikipedia [1] but
| basically the operations costs are funded (in part) by
| people paying for telescope time. The project that is
| currently paying for the telescope gets exclusive access
| for a 1 year "embargo" period, after which the data
| becomes public.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Teles
| cope#Gro...
| wthomp wrote:
| Small correction, no one will be able to pay for time on
| JWST. But if you put in a proposal for time and it's
| accepted, they will pay _you_. That 's to make sure there
| is sufficient funds available to properly make use of the
| data you proposed for.
| dguest wrote:
| Actually that's sort of a large correction, thanks for
| pointing that out. Isn't it a bit of an inversion of the
| norm in astrophysics? I'd thought many grants included
| money for telescope time.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Any real science will be done on the raw images, not on the
| color composites released for the public.
|
| These color composite images really show off how awesome
| JWST is. They're meant for the public to enjoy (astronomers
| enjoy them too).
| shitpostbot wrote:
| I had always assumed they were doing it completely
| mathematically though. Like collating spectrometry readings
| to know what elements were present where and figuring out the
| temperature for blackbody emission or something, or even just
| linearly transforming the raw data from the spectrum the
| telescope can receive to the visible spectrum.
|
| Kinda disappointing if it's really just a paint by numbers
| Photoshop to look nice
| bowsamic wrote:
| No it's done by hand with artistic license
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| But, the inferred data is supposed to help us determine what
| I might see if I could teleport there (and time travel, not
| die, etc)--right?
| [deleted]
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| You'd have a tough time defining "there" in images like
| this, and your eyes are not evolved to see faint, diffuse,
| glowing gas structures in the infrared.
| charxyz wrote:
| Is there an easy way to just scroll through the images?
| advantager wrote:
| https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery
| eutropia wrote:
| I kinda love this comment. It highlights the absurd dichotomy
| between what "experts" see and what "lay people" see when they
| look at the same thing.
|
| Parent just wants to see some cool images from Earth's latest
| and greatest space telescope, preferably in a convenient way.
|
| Astrophysicists from NASA, ESA, et al. are hanging off the data
| and details from every last photon collected - each one having
| traveled billions of years from their origin deep in the past
| of our universe.
|
| With every point of light in the images, the instruments on
| Webb and associated computer analysis here on earth analyze
| each facet of the spectra, inferring the chemical composition
| of galaxies we may have never even seen before as a species -
| calculating how much spacetime expanded in the long and lonely
| journey of those photons hurtling through our universe for
| billions of years, path bent by warping gravity fields,
| colliding and remitting from galactic dust to finally arrive at
| a superchilled mirror segment more than a million miles from
| earth.
|
| But hey, can we just get a scrollable feed of these in a web-
| optimized image format?
|
| [ edit: I guess it wasn't clear -- I genuinely love the
| question. I'm not being sarcastic. YES obviously people want to
| look at the images and get excited from press release - YES
| obviously scientists are using a different data stream and not
| the press release site. What's really cool is that the same
| origin (12.5 hours of observing a tiny spec of sky) can be used
| for both. And genuinely the absurd dichotomy is funny, and
| cool. I guess there's so much sneering elitism on HN that it's
| easy to get lumped into the same boat. ]
| canjobear wrote:
| This is a press release website. The scientists interested in
| every individual photon aren't browsing this site or anything
| like it to find their data. The entire point of this site is
| to look cool and generate excitement, so yes, it should be
| scrollable and web-optimized.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah? And? So?
|
| If it's the pretty pictures that gets people interested, then
| show them the pretty pictures. We all paid for it, so let us
| see them.
| toombowoombo wrote:
| Why should these two be mutually exclusive?
|
| Even within research projects we wish to find well organised
| datsets.
|
| Asking about scrollable images seems to be a fair question to
| me, especially in the context of a press release.
| CorpOverreach wrote:
| NASA's website gives a much easier view of the pictures:
| https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages
| leephillips wrote:
| Thank you. The linked website is horrendous.
| exhilaration wrote:
| I hate linking to a non-NASA site but the New York Times makes
| it really easy to just scroll through: https://nyti.ms/3ALiTQi
| cvoss wrote:
| Would highly recommend spending time gazing at each one in full
| resolution. The deep field in particular is underwhelming until
| you look at it as closely as possible. Then it becomes
| extraordinarily spectacular.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Give it some time, and NASA will definitely get a gallery where
| imagery can be viewed in a more friendly browsing experience.
| These are the astro-imagery equivalent of "hot off the
| presses". They just haven't had time, nor enough content, to
| get a full gallery up yet. All of the other platforms have
| these types of galleries, so just a bit more patience is needed
| from all of us while the JWST gets to work! (I'm sitting on my
| hands trying to be patient myself)
| Tagbert wrote:
| Try this https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images
| icey wrote:
| There's a feed on Flickr
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/with/5221053...
| matesz wrote:
| Not to spoil anything, but anybody else here finding these
| results quite underwelming?
| Jorchime wrote:
| Hubbles pictures were probably new to you, so in a sense this
| is "just" an iteration. I think you just had the
| perspective/expectation that this will be new as well. Maybe a
| bit much for the very first public results of a scientific
| experiment.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| I'm super curious how you could find these underwhelming. My
| mind is blown just scrolling across each of the images.
|
| What exactly were you expecting from them?
| matesz wrote:
| I agree, not only pictures are amazing, but the idea that is
| actually works, just crazy.
|
| I ment more in the context of images taken by Hubble
| telescope - you know, all the hype. 25 years of work, 40mln
| hours worked, billions spent. Pictures are better than
| hubbles, but not by orders of magnitude, which is what I
| expected. That's why underwhelming.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think that'll depend how much you read.
|
| If you look only at the picture, it's gonna be hard to tell
| versus, say,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field#/media/File:...
| for the deep-field shot or
| https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2007/16/2099-Im...
| for the Carina Nebula shot.
|
| If you read the details, the fact that JWST can resolve much
| dimmer light sources much more quickly than Hubble ever had a
| hope of should be fairly compelling from a "how much science
| can we do?" standpoint.
| nullc wrote:
| Compared to what? They surely blow away my astrophotos! :P
|
| Things like looking for IR spectra of water vapor in the
| atmosphere of planets outside of our solar system we can't even
| do from earth, since our own atmosphere is not transparent at
| those wavelengths due to the water in it. (ditto for oxygen).
|
| A thing they mentioned in the presentation today but mostly
| only in passing, was that images like that deep field image
| were captured with only something like a dozen hours of data
| collection and had better resolution and much better SNR and
| many more far redshift objects visible at all than an image of
| the same scene that took Hubble weeks of data collection to
| make.
| willis936 wrote:
| A mass spec of a galaxy 13.1 Bn years ago is pretty amazing and
| informs new answers to the biggest questions of the universe.
|
| None of these images really stretch the legs of the instrument
| either. A hot jupiter is not an interesting exoplanet. It's a
| taste.
| omegalulw wrote:
| Have you seen overlay comparisons to Hubble? The detail is
| significantly improved.
| FailMore wrote:
| THIS IS SOOOO AWESOME. So happy to be alive with this happening!
| Dopameaner wrote:
| I didnt realize we had a 3d map of dark matter. Something to be
| mindful of now.
|
| Gathered the summary from the Royal Observatory's website[1]
| regarding Hubble's major contributions
|
| " - Helped pin down the age for the universe now known to be 13.8
| billion years, roughly three times the age of Earth.
|
| - Discovered two moons of Pluto, Nix and Hydra.
|
| - Helped determine the rate at which the universe is expanding.
|
| - Discovered that nearly every major galaxy is anchored by a
| black hole at the centre.
|
| - Created a 3-D map of dark matter."
| crhulls wrote:
| Here is a Hubble side by side of the deep field for comparison
|
| https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10159217085846758&se...
| systemvoltage wrote:
| This makes the Hubble telescope even more impressive in my
| eyes. Built 50 years ago with presumably 60 year old tech.
|
| > Hubble telescope was funded and built in the 1970s by the
| United States space agency NASA with contributions from the
| European Space Agency. Its intended launch was 1983, but the
| project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the
| 1986 Challenger disaster. Hubble was finally launched in 1990.
| mike10921 wrote:
| Ok to be honest I know it's not cool to admit it, but so far it
| all looks the same. If someone told me that the Webb picture
| was taken by Hubble I would not have thought about it for an
| extra second.
|
| I'm hoping that in the future we see pictures of locations and
| environments that are mind-blowing to the average person who
| loves space.
| mrandish wrote:
| These are just the initial "pretty pictures" processed to
| look nice and promoted as part of NASA's ongoing fundraising.
| The more valuable science payload is in the spectral data
| which will tell us about the composition of these objects.
| Another exciting aspect of of JWST is the IR instrument
| (NIRCAM) which can see red shifted wavelengths revealing much
| older objects from the early universe.
|
| To me, the real 'shock and awe' will be when scientific
| papers are published which reveal new knowledge and deeper
| understanding of our universe. This will take some time
| although I'm sure the first papers are already racing toward
| pre-print.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The difference is in a) the details and b) the length of time
| the telescope has to gather light to get the photo. JWST got
| the photo in hours when Hubble took weeks, and there's easily
| 10x as many objects in the JWST shot.
|
| JWST can thus observe much fainter and much more distant
| objects - galaxies billions of years old, exoplanets, etc.,
| and it can do _more of it_.
| patwolf wrote:
| If they pointed JWST somewhere for weeks instead of hours,
| would it pick up even more objects, or is it hitting the
| limit to what exists in that part of space?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You might be able to see some additional fainter objects,
| but the deep field shot is looking at 13 billion year old
| galaxies - some of the first in existence. There's not
| much older you can look at.
| mike10921 wrote:
| Of course, I get it, but we are allowed to admit that to
| the average person so far it looks like more of the same.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| The idea that this looks the same to the average person
| is insane to me. What aspect of these two photos looks
| the same?
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| Yes, we can admit it for some of the images, like the
| first one (crisper details and new galaxies
| notwithstanding). Some of them are pretty stunning in the
| improvement, though, IMO:
|
| - Carina Nebulae: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments
| /vxengq/carina_nebula...
|
| - Southern Ring Nebulae: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/c
| omments/vxfdva/hastily_throw...
|
| The new ones make the old ones look blurry and dull!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure how you someone can look at those
| two photos side-by-side and think they're the same.
| Hubble's is like slapping a 360p cam rip on a 4k TV.
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| Unless you know what you're looking at, most if not
| everything looks mundane. It's only with perspective that
| we can grasp the beauty of things like these, or just
| other things, like ants.
|
| To most people, ants are just an annoying bug. But to
| scientists (and curious non-scientists), ants are
| endlessly fascinating creatures. Together with scientists
| who speak to "common folk", even they can understand the
| beauty in how ants work.
|
| That's why outreach and education is so important. And
| sometimes the beauty doesn't come from the direct thing
| (like these images, although I'd argue they are beautiful
| by themselves too) but from the indirect implication of
| the thing (time to acquire the picture, the data gathered
| to "draw" the picture, the community for even enabling
| this picture from being drawn and so on).
| bowsamic wrote:
| What are you expecting to see exactly? Aliens?
| pavon wrote:
| > JWST got the photo in hours when Hubble took weeks.
|
| For this image, Hubble only had 1.7 hours of exposure while
| JWST had 12.5 hours.
|
| More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32074989
| loudmax wrote:
| I kind of agree with you, these pictures do look like more of
| the same. But that's okay, the real exciting stuff isn't
| going to be pretty pictures, it's going to be what
| astronomers and physicists are able to learn by peering deep
| into the origins of the universe. The pictures of galaxies
| are nice to look at, but the real ramifications of JWST will
| take years to play out.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The very rough equivalent in computer terms: a 1997 PC
| computing something and taking a week or so to do it and
| returning the answer: 3.
|
| The same by the 2022 version: 3.14159265358979323846 in a few
| milliseconds.
|
| Both the speed of the computation and the resolution of the
| result are what makes it impressive, not the fact that the
| nature of the universe does not change fundamentally when
| viewed across a longer span of time.
|
| It is mind-blowing, but maybe not to the 'average person who
| loves space'. But if you stop for a bit longer to understand
| what it took to create that image and what it is that you are
| actually looking at (the age of the objects involved, their
| apparent size and the resolving power and temperature of the
| telescope required to make it) it becomes a lot more
| impressive.
| mike10921 wrote:
| Understood, i've been following this forever and am super
| excited to see where it takes us. I'm just saying we are
| allowed to admit that to us these pictures look like more
| of the same despite knowing that they are very much not.
| jacquesm wrote:
| To me they do not and I am probably also an 'average
| person who loves space', in fact I'm blown away by the
| results on display here and it is way beyond my
| expectations. From a tech perspective this is humanity at
| its peak.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| My understanding is that it is also 12-13 hours of exposure for
| the Webb image vs weeks for Hubble.
| pavon wrote:
| That is incorrect. The famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field
| image[1] took 11.3 days of imaging spread over four months
| (because of high demand to use Hubble). However, that is a
| different part of the sky. The Hubble image shown here was
| taken as part of RELICS[2], a survey of images to find good
| candidates for JWST to image, and was only exposed for 1.7
| hours (5 orbits at ~20 minutes each), compared to JWST's
| exposure time of 12.5 hours. So comparisons between between
| Hubble and JWST for that particular shot are not fair to
| Hubble.
|
| [1]https://esahubble.org/images/heic0611b/
|
| [2]https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/
| kzrdude wrote:
| Right and it's slightly rotated, 20-30 degrees (guess). Just
| for others that try to line them up
| quaintdev wrote:
| A GIF comparing both Hubble and JWST
| https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif
| ehsankia wrote:
| Here's another tool with all 4 photos:
|
| https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare/
| bdefore wrote:
| The additional detail of the red spiral galaxy around 12:30
| is stark by comparison to others. Any ideas on why?
| nacogo wrote:
| The reddest objects in the JWST are frequently not even
| present in the Hubble image, as they were redshifted into a
| band of light Hubble couldn't even detect. That's my
| favorite part about this image - those galaxies we can now
| see which were previously redshifted beyond our capacity to
| detect. They're the oldest, and receding from us the
| fastest.
| wolfd wrote:
| I made this page (posted in another thread yesterday) because
| I was rather underwhelmed by the .gif. I think the page shows
| in much better detail the difference between the telescopes'
| capabilities.
|
| https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/
|
| (If you're on mobile, you should be able to zoom in and still
| use the slider)
| fatbas202 wrote:
| This is really awesome. Thank you!
| emptyfile wrote:
| Great stuff!
| april_22 wrote:
| damn, this is really awesome!!
| nabakin wrote:
| Interested in adding the Carina Nebula comparison? I'm
| crop-aligning the full resolution images rn and will have
| them in a bit
|
| Edit: btw you should add the ability to zoom on desktop
| too. Would make it a lot easier to see the massive
| difference between the two
| 323 wrote:
| I am confused because I thought it was an infrared telescope?
|
| Are these images as received, or are they frequency shifted post
| processed into the visible range?
| dougmwne wrote:
| Yes, they are frequency shifted. Many telescope images are in
| false color. I can understand that we are interested in visible
| light since that's most within our experience, but the human
| eye was not evolved for the astronomical and universal so we
| need some help. Frequency shifting is a tool just like a lens.
| clint wrote:
| Humans cannot see infrared light
| airstrike wrote:
| Did you expect 100% black jpgs all around?
| brandmeyer wrote:
| I don't know which filters were used to generate these
| mediagenic images, but you can see the available filters here:
| https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam...
|
| Note that the "colors" used in that graphic are also false,
| since only F070W and F090W are in the human eyeball's passband.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Almost all images are frequency shifted, often just to what
| makes things look cool. Still makes it cool IMO!
| willis936 wrote:
| As others have said: there is frequency shifting done. However,
| it is important to know that distant galaxies are red shifted
| making the visible spectrum be in IR. In the case of JWST the
| frequency shifted images may be close to the non-redshifted
| visible spectrum.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's just your monitor doesn't support infrared color space and
| therefore shows the wrong colors. ;)
| dangerwill wrote:
| samstave wrote:
| Need to get new Phil Mosbey prints of this on hex prints.
|
| (Phil mosbey is the astro-photographer who made the hex print of
| JWT which nasa bought and placed in lobby (if you havent seen his
| space calandar, its amazing.)
|
| he grew up with my younger brother, and I have some art/prints in
| my house of his.
|
| -
|
| Although, I agree with some other folks ; Why cant we point
| Hubble or JWT at the planets in our solar system, or the closest
| objects to us.
|
| The deep-field view of both hubble and JWT are wonderful, but
| whats the diff on pointing it to closer objects.
|
| --
|
| Further, /noStupidQuestions: Why at out level of tech and the
| fact that all of these projects are funded by tax money (as a
| portion) can we not have live streaming (even if high latency)
| from all such projects?
|
| What is the national security preventing us from having a space
| (or any other) telescope funded by public taxes from having the
| ability to see what it sees, even if with reasonable delay...
|
| Wouldn't it be interesting to bounty analysis from such ;
|
| Basically, allow for arm-chair amateur space-folks-ham-radio-
| style to do submit findings for bounties on discoveries?
| skilled wrote:
| I hope someone from NASA will read this or perhaps someone can
| forward this message, but all we want (mere mortal humans) is
| quick access to the direct links to the highest resolution
| images.
|
| From what I can tell it takes anywhere from 5 (if you know what
| you're doing) to 10 clicks (once you understand the UI) to find
| all the links for a -singular- image.
|
| Thanks nonetheless.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| This is pretty easy option
|
| https://webbtelescope.org/news/news-releases?Collection=Firs...
|
| 1. Pick subject 2. Pick image which interests you (bottom) 3.
| Pick resolution you need (left sidebar)
| tempaccount2022 wrote:
| cool
| bdefore wrote:
| All the additional detail in the nebulae shots in particular!
|
| What's resonating with me today: As a web dev, I cannot imagine
| the feeling of so much dedication and effort from so many people
| finally unfolding to release after 30 years. One moonshot longer
| than full careers. Some of those responsible (hundreds?
| thousands?) retired or no longer with us. What a sacrifice, and
| what an achievement.
| uhtred wrote:
| So if they point this thing at an exoplanet and it has advanced
| life will we see a picture much the same as when we see a photo
| of earth taken from the space station? i.e. city lights etc?
| boriskourt wrote:
| Already answered in sibling:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32072067
| Shadonototra wrote:
| This website is one of the worst i ever seen
|
| Low res pictures on announcement day
|
| fire this web dev
| guerrilla wrote:
| Seriously, very frustrating and almost anxiety-provoking.
| drewcon wrote:
| Hi res downloads are available on the left side rail.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| > Full Res, 14575 X 8441, TIF (136.99 MB)
|
| If this is low res then what is high res?
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