Webb Telescope Image Sharpness Check

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/04/Webb_in_full_focus

by perihelions • 4 years ago

231 155 4 years ago

esa.int

_joel• 4 years ago

I'm so looking forward to proper first light. Waited half my life for it!

xmddmx3• 4 years ago

Ok great, but is there any way to click to see a high resolution image? The website design seems to prevent this.

perihelions6• 4 years ago

(.png) https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im...

xmddmx3• 4 years ago

Interesting - when I zoom in (to the 'detail' box) it looks very striated : i'm seeing what appears to be some sort of 45 degree diagnoal scanning procedure. Is this from the source or some sort of artifact of PNG? (zoom into the top left box which says 'detail')

jug• 4 years ago

Wow, this is almost overwhelming and literally breathtaking.

The quote "My god, it's full of stars" is all that springs to mind.

mholt• 4 years ago

Right-click, Open Image in New Tab

1970-01-01• 4 years ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207376

interestica• 4 years ago

Yeah seems broken. New tab. Though I expected better than a 5meg png

SemanticStrengh8• 4 years ago

Why does MIRI looks so much better?

j4nt4b• 4 years ago

The release mentions that MIRI captures on a wavelength which includes both starlight and interstellar clouds, which admittedly looks awesome when put together!

GuB-42• 4 years ago

MIRI is the only instrument that works in mid-infrared, the other three work in near-infrared. It simply isn't seeing the same things.

"Better looking" is subjective, we are literally talking about your favorite color. I personally prefer the other ones, MIRI looks blurry, but really, they all have their use and they all have great scientific potential.

Robotbeat3• 4 years ago

Because Webb is optimized for looking through the dust clouds and nebulosity, whereas we’re all used to looking at sweet nebulas from Hubble with their gorgeous dust clouds instead of just a collection of points of light with diffraction patterns.

Webb really isn’t going to be the crowd pleaser that Hubble is. And that’s okay. But I do kind of wish that was communicated better early on.

SemanticStrengh8• 4 years ago

If only people saw what the optical terrestrial planet finder would have captured instead of webb..

quercusa• 4 years ago

The optical performance of the telescope continues to be better than the engineering team’s most optimistic predictions. ... The image quality delivered to all instruments is “diffraction-limited,” meaning that the fineness of detail that can be seen is as good as physically possible given the size of the telescope.

Congratulations, Webb team!

COGlory• 4 years ago

i.e. the aberrations and detector aren't limiting the resolution of the image?

7373737373• 4 years ago

I wish they would share many more photos, and also document what's happening on the engineers' screens

The idea of 'exclusive use' rubs me the wrong way

bnkamalesh• 4 years ago

True, knowledge of the universe, our planet etc. being exclusive is indeed very irksome/painful :(

perihelions6• 4 years ago

Here's the MIRI image (top-right) compared against Spitzer:

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/05/MIRI_and_S... ("MIRI and Spitzer comparison image")

lisper5• 4 years ago

Wow.

Looking at that image I feel a weird superposition of awe and anger. Awe at the incredible work that it took to get that image and the fact that I'm around to see it, and anger at the rise of pseudo-science and the glorification of ignorance. Acquiring scientific knowledge is incredibly hard work, and we as a society denigrate it at our peril. The extent to which science denial is in fashion nowadays really steams my clams.

teakettle4227• 4 years ago

The emotions you’re expressing — awe and anger at disbelievers — are rooted more in religious sciencism than actual science.

Science is critical and robust under criticism. Sciencism is not.

gfodor• 4 years ago

It’s all too easy to confuse skepticism with science denialism. It’s important to be skeptical of scientific claims. This is essentially the core engine of scientific progress.

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

Pseudo science will be here forever because it is much easier to get into than actual science and people will always look for explanations where science says 'we don't know'.

Razengan• 4 years ago

anger at the rise of pseudo-science

As a consolation, it will not spread beyond this minuscule speck in the cosmos.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Those who refuse to look through telescopes (because the evidence might upset their treasured notions of reality) have always been around. I wondered whether that particular story about Galileo's contemporaries was apocryphal, but it appears to have some fairly solid evidence:

https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2016...

However, note that 'science denial' has been an attack used by all manner of charlatans and fraudsters - as well as by people who are simply ignorant of facts - to defend their positions throughout our so-called 'age of reason'. This has often led to the spectacle of two different groups of perhaps well-intentioned (or not) people hurling the insult of 'science denialist' at each other while refusing to engage in actual science, i.e. examining observational data, conducting experiments, developing theories, rinse and repeat.

Part of the problem is that science often reveals facts that powerful interests don't want to accept, for example, that smoking cigarettes greatly increases the risk of lung cancer, or that burning fossil fuels leads to warming of the planet and climatic destabilization, or that using antibiotics on factory farms increases the rate at which antibiotic resistance arises (due to the pressure of natural selection as per evolutionary theory). These outfits have made a practice of hiring deceptive and dishonest 'scientists' for PR purposes, because simply accepting the science would be expensive and/or embarrassing, and they're the ones who tend to scream 'science denialism!' the loudest.

Hence it is not a very useful phrase, and it's always better to be explicit about what particular scientific concept you view as being subjected to attack on dubious grounds.

MrPatan• 4 years ago

We're being conned. Yes, Webb telescope is Science, and it's great, and it's lovely, and there should be more of it and it should get more respect and resources.

But.

Other people take the same word "Science" and use it for.... less clear-cut stuff. With less clear-cut benefits. And they use the same word because they want to get more respect and more resources and want to confuse you.

This works because it's hard to know what's "Science". Most people use heuristics like "My side's Authority says so" or "It happens in a University" or "It uses Times News Roman".

Unfortunately there is no easy solution. You'll have to think for yourself. If only there was some kind of method to tell the bullshit apart from the facts!

Alex3917• 4 years ago

If mainstream scientists were all denying that space exists despite these images, would it not surprise you that there would arise an anti-science movement? Because that’s basically how the current one came into existence.

monkeybutton2• 4 years ago

Why do stars appear spike-y in the new images?

perihelions6• 4 years ago

Diffraction spikes from occluding support poles:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

It's beautiful. I can't wait until someone gets time on it to point it at some of the known exoplanets to study them at a higher resolution than was possible so far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exopla...

perihelions6• 4 years ago

Those will still be optical points, sadly. There's no (spatial) resolution possible for things smaller than the diffraction limit.

edit: But it can still provide 1-D light curves, for planets rotating at the right speeds. Combined with spectroscopy, it's plausible it could show a planet where one can say, e.g. "this side is ocean; this side has a continent".

SemanticStrengh8• 4 years ago

How about MIRI vs herschel. I don't think the perceived difference would be high for this picture.

belter• 4 years ago

"My God, it's full of stars!"

spitfire• 4 years ago

Fun fact the Hubble space telescope and now the James Webb uses NeXT computers to calibrate some of the instruments on the ground. Possibly even to test out configuration changes.

In particular they’re used for the Aberrated Beam Analyser. The ABA has been used to verify the optical performance of many different science instruments.

perihelions6• 4 years ago

I believe the scheduling planner is written in Common Lisp also.

edit: It's derived from the one written for Hubble,

https://franz.com/success/customer_apps/scheduling/sti.lhtml ("Spike: Hubble Telescope Scheduling System")

curling_grad• 4 years ago

This reminds me of this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01431-y

peeters• 4 years ago

Some informative background about this release here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-pNS5mDExQ. I found it really interesting; it includes comparisons against past telescopes, insight into what physical limits come into play causing image artifacts, known engineering issues etc.

alphabetting• 4 years ago

Love it. Seriously can't wait for the first images this summer.

m3kw92• 4 years ago

Aren’t these first images too?

dylan6044• 4 years ago

these are test prints. they are still tweaking everything about it. you take a picture to see where you are. you analyze it, make adjustments, and take a new picture. lather, rinse, repeat. the fact that these pictures are so much clearer than the best the previous gen platform could do is worth letting everyone know this isn't suffering from the same issues as Hubble. it's working this well without being fully calibrated, so everything is nominal.

danvk• 4 years ago

Are the photons that land in between the instruments just lost? Why not make them cover more of the space?

rich_sasha2• 4 years ago

All these images are red-ish in colour. I guess that's just an aesthetic decision here - presumably the instruments themselves are "monochromatic", plus filters are available?

I'm guessing these pictures taken are single exposures, as opposed to composed with multiple filters, but since Webb works "in infrared", pictures should be "reddish". It's not even like, "infrared is red". It would be some other colour if we could see it.

Or are these pictures genuinely stacked and some kind of false colour palette mapped onto them?

nabla9• 4 years ago

James Webb works mostly in IR range or close to it. Near-infrared, mid-infrared.

ps. Hubble was not the largest optical space telescope before Webb. It was Herschel that operated in Lagrange point (L2) 29 April 2013 - shut off on 17 June 2013. https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Missions/Herschel/(class)...

What you can expect is sharper Herschel.

rich_sasha2• 4 years ago

Right, but here, in these specific JPEG images, the "red tint" is a, hmm, red herring, right? Presumably these images are monochromatic in some IR band, and red tint added for PR reasons? The color does not convey information, I'm guessing?

Or are these images genuinely stacked from a few sub-spectrum images? If so, what exactly is the hue of the colour?

If it's the former, I'm always amazed how much effort goes into making space exploration eye-popping. Artists' renders of spaceships and exploding supernovae, tarted up space telescope pictures and so on.

Webb Telescope Image Sharpness Check

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