[HN Gopher] NASA's Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of...
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NASA's Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
Author : pizza
Score : 215 points
Date : 2022-10-19 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nasa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nasa.gov)
| ars wrote:
| When I go outside I can barely see any stars, unlike my ancestors
| who saw a sky utterly filled with stars.
|
| Then I go on my computer and I can see more stars, with more
| details, than my ancestors even imagined.
|
| I can't decide if it's a worthwhile tradeoff.
| xeromal wrote:
| Take a trip out to the mojave and you can see stars like your
| ancestors. It's awe-inspiring and otherwordly.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Or if you're on the East Coast, come to Pennsylvania!
| https://www.darksky.org/our-
| work/conservation/idsp/parks/che...
| wcarron wrote:
| The Berkshires in western Massachussets, are also a place
| of amazing grandeur, in terms of visible night sky beauty.
| wcarron wrote:
| This is very understandable. I myself grew up in a 'decent'
| night sky area. Then I moved to LA. Absolutely abysmal in terms
| of night sky visibility. I felt lucky to see a dozen or so
| stars.
|
| Now, having moved to Flagstaff, AZ, a dark sky community, the
| night sky is fantastic. It has returned to me the beauty and
| wonder the sky once must have instilled in everyone. It's not
| the grand canyon, or deep in Death Valley or other parts of the
| Mojave. But it is enough. On new moons, not more than 30
| minutes from town, the milky way can be so bright as to leave
| an 'afterglow' when one closes their eyes.
|
| Computers and these images, while fascinating, will never truly
| rival the beauty of your own eyes seeing the night sky
| unaccosted by human development.
| qubitcoder wrote:
| That's sad but understandable. The night sky where I grew up is
| but a fraction of what was visible as a child.
|
| Take a trip outside of well-lit areas if possible. See
| https://www.darksky.org/ to find a truly "dark" location.
| mwidell wrote:
| James Webb telescope is great and all, but I have to say I think
| the older image is more stunning and more aesthetically pleasing.
| Cleaner, simpler, nicer colors, more mysterious looking.
| peanutz454 wrote:
| I agree with this, and I hope a simple comparison of photos
| from the two telescopes does not capture headlines anymore. I
| hope the next story to hit the top is one about something new
| we learned due to JWST, which I am sure is already happening
| but maybe not grabbing our attention the same way.
| piyh wrote:
| Get all those stars and galaxies out of my dust and gas
| photography!
| itishappy wrote:
| 100% agree, but of course that's not the point.
|
| Webb's purpose is scientific measurements, not cool looking
| images. (Though wallpapers are a nice bonus!)
|
| When it comes to aesthetically pleasing images, I'm
| consistently blown away by the composite images combining Webb
| with other devices like Chandra.
|
| https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2022/chandrawebb/
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This is great stuff, hopefully the JWST can deliver images like
| this for a long time to come.
| lencastre wrote:
| Just wow
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Yep
| debone wrote:
| Why does it look like there's some really bright object shining
| from the top-right of the pillars, giving the impression that
| there's actually a shadow on it?
|
| edit: right, not left.
|
| edit 2: well, there's no impression here. There IS something
| larger shining it, the rest of the structure the pillars are part
| of.
|
| Picture: (mobile users warning 52mb image)
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Eagle_Ne...
| rubinlinux wrote:
| IIRC it is radiation bouncing off its clumps of hydrogen from
| nearby stars.
| debone wrote:
| Ah, so radiation is being emitted and blocked in a way that
| coincides to the way we interpret 3d objects, is that right?
| Because if it would be uniform, the bright orange colors
| would be uniformly distributed?
| comboy wrote:
| > so radiation is being emitted and blocked in a way that
| coincides to the way we interpret 3d objects
|
| It's not coincidental, this is how our vision works.
| debone wrote:
| No, I was thinking in terms that the pillars are glowing
| and illuminating themselves, which would be really
| coincidence to have this luminescence only on areas that
| would look like a shadow or not.
|
| It turns out that for my original question, there is
| actually something illuminating it from the top-right. As
| massive as the pillars are, they are part of a yet bigger
| structure [0] and the brightness generated is allowing us
| to see it with better depth. It's really incomprehensible
| to grasp how large things can get.
|
| [0]: (mobile data warning 52mb pic) https://upload.wikime
| dia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Eagle_Ne...
| callumprentice wrote:
| Awe inspiring - can anyone point me to a description of the scale
| we're looking at? I'm sure it must be unimaginably large. What is
| the distance between the two top "arms" for example?
|
| Edit: easier to find than I imagined and Good Lord!
| https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/8tfo8i/the_amazing_s...
| Difficult to comprehend.
| sparrish wrote:
| The photo here has a scale bar.
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01G...
|
| Looks to be maybe 2 light years between those two arms.
| callumprentice wrote:
| Thank you.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Also look at the comparison to the Hubble image.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/st...
|
| Impressive to see the infrared spectrum seeing through all the
| background gas to the millions of stars.
| steffan wrote:
| I think they're millions of _galaxies_ , which is even more
| amazing
| itishappy wrote:
| The YouTube link [1] states that most of these are in fact
| stars. The gas from the nebula obscures the distant galaxies
| we're used to seeing.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1__KBHIo_xs
| technonerd wrote:
| Handy Dandy Slider action between the two!
|
| https://esawebb.org/images/comparisons/weic2216/
| nuccy wrote:
| Technically the comparison is not totally fair, that Hubble
| image was taken in visible light, while Webb's in infrared.
| Dust blocks visible light stronger, so background stars are
| effectively hidden from Hubble, but not from Webb. Here [1]
| you can see same field in visible and close infrared taken by
| Hubble. Webb of course shines in all the fine details and
| faint stars number.
|
| [1] https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/screen/hei
| c15...
| peanutz454 wrote:
| Now I am intrigued, the infrared image from Hubble seems to
| be able to see through even more clouds than JWST! What
| gives?
| abcc8 wrote:
| I think the comparison is (rightly) meant to highlight the
| different imaging capabilities of the two telescopes.
| xeromal wrote:
| But if the hubble can take an infrared picture, that
| would be a better comparison point, no?
| [deleted]
| nuccy wrote:
| Webb observes "much further" into the IR [1].
|
| 1. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/im
| age/hu... (this image is from [2])
|
| 2. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-vs-webb-
| on-the-s...
| dwringer wrote:
| JWST is undeniably a superior and remarkable instrument,
| but there has been a bit of a trend I have noticed on
| social media - and this may just be my perception rather
| than reality - of comparing it with suboptimal
| alternatives rather than the best image we had prior to
| the JWST, often making the new images look dramatically
| better when in fact the improvements to the best images
| we already had are more subtle (perhaps because they are
| particularly subtle on low res article thumbnails and
| mobile devices?)
| itishappy wrote:
| I doubt it's anything nefarious. I think it's due to
| choosing comparisons based on popularity vs content.
|
| Hubble's visible light Pillars of Creation image, for
| example, is super famous and instantly recognizable, but
| I'm not sure I would have known what I was looking at if
| the infrared version was used.
|
| Also, different devices rarely have exactly the same
| usage and specifications. For example, Webb and Hubble
| have very different wavelength sensitivities, and this
| has tradeoffs in resolution and quality. In other words,
| the subjective image quality you get from the pictures
| may not tell the whole story of how valuable the data
| itself is.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| Funny enough, if you showed someone these two images without
| additional context, I'd wager the majority would think that the
| left one was taken by a modern telescope in 2022 and the right
| one from an older one decades ago.
| layer8 wrote:
| It almost looks like a hand grasping for the stars.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01G...
| layer8 wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the left (top) column is four lightyears
| in length.
| siavash wrote:
| Every time I see a photo of Pillars of Creation it makes me
| wonder if we would even be able to distinguish an unfathomably
| optimized engineered system from what we consider raw physics
| with our current understanding.
| oliveshell wrote:
| _With our current understanding_ , we could not do this.
|
| This follows from the fact that there is still a lot of "raw
| physics" we do not fully understand. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
| metadat wrote:
| Stunningly beautiful. Nothing insightful to add except that I
| absolutely love this! Thank you for sharing, @pizza.
| xracy wrote:
| Is there some limit on the number of pictures the Webb Telescope
| can take in a day?
|
| Every time I see a picture from it, I just want more.
| pkaye wrote:
| There is a 68GB capacity SSD which limits how much data it can
| store and it can transmit 28GB to earth per 24 hours. It
| operation is batch operation. Job files are queued up to
| operate at specific times.
| TT-392 wrote:
| Depends on the image I think, shutterspeed can easily be a few
| hours
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I assume it takes some time to aim the telescope.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think the bottleneck is actually the connection down to earth
| Melatonic wrote:
| This is mindblowingly cool
| dirtyid wrote:
| Wild picture, but less sublime than the original. Same feels when
| NASA/ESA deconstructed the gas layers in 3d to refect the thin
| layers (like old school parallax animation background) instead of
| the awesome awesome voluminous celestia architecture I had in my
| head. Some old shows look worse in HD.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/pillars-of-creati...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I do kinda get a bit more "oomph" from the old picture because
| it feels like it's been punched out of space rather than being
| a wispy thing in the way (e.g. you can see more stars through
| it.) Which is bonkers because the new photo is _amazing_.
| dirtyid wrote:
| >"oomph"
|
| Yeah, I think James Webb (being amazing) and resolving so
| much more stars in these photos kind of removes the oomph of
| original Hubble photos that showed seemingly lonely cosmic
| monoliths in largely empty void Which made the subject feel
| more sublime. New photos have so much stars which everywhere,
| shifts the enormity of structures onto the sheer abundance of
| the background universe. It makes the subject feel smaller by
| revealing just how much bigger the cosmos is. Amazing in a
| different way.
| ninefathom wrote:
| Inner geek: "Wow, the resolution is incredible! What an amazing
| technical feat."
|
| Inner insignificant mote of life hurtling through the cosmos:
| "Wow, I feel so tiny and fragile and humbled."
| anjc wrote:
| Why are so many low magnitude stars in this image, not shrouded
| by gas, not visible at all in the previous image? Surely some
| visible light must be emitted by these?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If they are red-shifted enough, Hubble wouldn't have seen them
| at all.
|
| Keep in mind that while the X and Y axes in this shot are only
| a few light years across, the Z axis is potentially 13 billion
| light years deep.
| leke wrote:
| Oh no, It's The Claw!!!
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Is there a way to get rid of the six diffusion spikes in images
| from James Webb? Deconvolution or something? I guess it would
| have some cost in terms of resolution, but I think it would be
| worth it for these sorts of publicity images.
| iamjs wrote:
| I understand Nebulae like the Eagle Nebula are fairly dynamic
| regions of space, so I find it interesting that we have
| photographs of the same region over a 27 years time span and at a
| glance, the structure of the Pillars of Creation appears
| virtually identical.
|
| I understand that 27 years is minuscule on the cosmic timescale,
| but what order of timescale would be necessary for the evolution
| of Pillars of Creation to be are apparent to a casual observer?
| hundreds of years? thousands?
| shagie wrote:
| A bit more cosmic scale that we can see over time are light
| echos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_echo
|
| In particular, the at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V838_Monocerotis there's a video
| of the echo.
|
| For another dynamic area with things changing on a human
| lifespan, the black hole at the center of the galaxy we can
| watch stars orbit it. https://youtu.be/XA7CAVm31z0
| mnw21cam wrote:
| The classic example of this is the Hubble Variable Nebula.
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2261 and
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeiVERr2J2Q
| debone wrote:
| Even more interesting when you think about the plethora of
| events that must be happening there in this interval of time at
| human scale. The Sun alone, 8 light minutes away, in seconds is
| consuming hydrogen and generating energy at amounts that we as
| humanity could use for thousands and thousands of years.
| Reason077 wrote:
| What's up with all the "lens flares"? Is this a flaw in the
| imaging? Some real phenomenon? Or just an artistic license effect
| that has been added to increase visual appeal?
| frabjoused wrote:
| They're diffraction spikes from the design of the telescope.
| https://www.theverge.com/23220109/james-webb-space-telescope...
| chubs wrote:
| I was wondering that too. I'm not a photography expert, but i
| recall that lens flares are in the shape of the lens. Since the
| telescope uses those honeycomb lenses, the 6-sided flares seem
| to make sense. Happy to be corrected of course.
| joshumax wrote:
| If by "lens flares" we're referring to the 6 spikey lines
| jetting from the stars, those are known as diffraction spikes
| and are a result of the 3 spider vanes holding the secondary
| mirror in front of the primary mirror cluster at the center
| of the optical axis. As light enters the primary mirror
| cluster in the JWT, bright points of lights such as stars
| have visible aberrations due to the position and orientation
| of these vanes. In the JWT which uses 3 of them, their
| orientation creates this 6 spike diffraction pattern. In the
| case of the Hubble telescope, which is based on the RC
| telescope design, it uses 4 vanes which creates a 4 spike
| diffraction pattern instead.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Would it be possible for them to algorithmically remove the lens
| artifacts? I suppose just "anything with hexagonal symmetry gets
| deleted". They're kinda pretty but it's sad to think that this
| isn't what it would actually look like if you had really good
| infrared eyes.
| wwarner wrote:
| As I understand it, they aren't exactly lens artifacts, they're
| stars in the foreground. The telescope can't see past them and
| we don't know what's there. To me, it would defeat the
| observational mission of the JWST to fill it in with some
| pixels that were similar to the rest of the background.
| However, I also think you raise a good point, since all these
| images are constructed from non-visible infra-red light and
| many decisions are made in that conversion process.
| vecter wrote:
| They're not talking about the stars, but the hexagonal spikes
| sticking out of the stars. Those are artifacts of the
| hexagonal lenses that the telescope uses.
| alex_young wrote:
| If you removed them wouldn't you just see black areas where
| they were?
| etrautmann wrote:
| Interesting- If you look closely at the super bright objects,
| there are both hexagonally symmetric artifacts and cardinal
| up/down/left/right artifacts. I'd love to hear from someone
| with knowledge of how these arise and what optical tradeoffs
| prevent designs from eliminating them.
| jwuphysics wrote:
| It's possible through deconvolution with a model of the
| "point spread function" aka PSF. There are techniques from
| radio astronomy (where interferometry necessitates some kind
| of Fourier basis model and deconvolution/imaging procedure)
| which has been extended to the optical domain.
|
| See for example: https://twitter.com/NGC3314/status/158244236
| 7482634242?t=Eaa...
| willis936 wrote:
| Isn't the PSF intensity-dependent? Can deconvolve high bit-
| depth data with a single filter? If not, aren't you limited
| by the distribution of intensities of the point sources
| present?
| lgl wrote:
| You can read about their formation on several publications.
| For instance: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-
| webb-spikes/
| Laremere wrote:
| There are 2 causes of diffraction spikes:
|
| 1. The hexagonal mirrors. Trade off is larger mirrors, and
| the ability to fold the telescope. 2. The struts holding the
| secondary mirror. Basically can't get rid of this without a
| very different telescope design.
|
| Causes of both are the best design for getting a lot of light
| into a space telescope's sensors. In practice has less impact
| on the science than you might think. The diffraction spikes
| are much fainter than the main image. It's only bright
| foreground stars - which the James Webb isn't trying to image
| anyways - that cause visible spikes.
| xwdv wrote:
| Imagine the civilizations that live between these pillars.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Can they live in the pillars?
| nelblu wrote:
| I was wondering the same. I am worried for them that they might
| be situated in a permanently light polluted skies, that would
| be really sad for all the astronomers in that civilizations.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Notice how every star twinkles the same way. I thought it was
| because of how the mirrors were arrayed. But this time the
| twinkles are different.
| valarauko wrote:
| Do you mean the hexagonal diffusion spikes? How are they
| different this time? I think the JWST image is just rotated to
| better align with the Hubble image.
| system2 wrote:
| I wish our planet was closer to it so we could send some probes
| into it. Knowing it wouldn't look like this up close, I still
| like to imagine.
| melling wrote:
| Nothing outside our solar system is close enough to send probes
| to explore.
|
| Perhaps we could blanket our system with robotic explorers for
| now. In the big scheme of things, it would be inexpensive.
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