James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live

https://webbtelescope.org/news/news-releases?Collection=First%20Images

by crhulls • 4 years ago

1109 394 4 years ago

webbtelescope.org

charxyz• 4 years ago

Is there an easy way to just scroll through the images?

Tagbert• 4 years ago

Try this https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images

advantager• 4 years ago

https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery

eutropia• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

dylan6042• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

exhilaration• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

dylan6042• 4 years ago

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)

icey• 4 years ago

There's a feed on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/with/5221053...

CorpOverreach• 4 years ago

NASA's website gives a much easier view of the pictures: https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

leephillips• 4 years ago

Thank you. The linked website is horrendous.

leeoniya4• 4 years ago

the Southern Ring Nebula (MIRI Image) is bizarrely very low res?

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/033/01G...

fumblebee• 4 years ago

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...

TremendousJudge• 4 years ago

Well, it's incredible in the sense that I can't believe it

DiogenesKynikos2• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

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.

jonplackett2• 4 years ago

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!

deelowe3• 4 years ago

https://petapixel.com/2022/07/11/comparing-hubble-to-james-w...

capableweb4• 4 years ago

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.

historynops• 4 years ago

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?

deelowe3• 4 years ago

More or less. That's how they've explained it in the past.

mackieem• 4 years ago

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

ceejayoz9• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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...

rbliss• 4 years ago

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...

MontagFTB2• 4 years ago

You beat me to it- incredibly helpful diagram. Thanks for sharing it.

coldpie5• 4 years ago

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.

moffkalast3• 4 years ago

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?

creatonez5• 4 years ago

Here is an image showing how each part of the distortion comes about - https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FOFC8ZPX0AIB...

MontagFTB2• 4 years ago

Here’s an infographic from NASA explaining the phenomenon: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7...

deanCommie4• 4 years ago

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.

deanCommie4• 4 years ago

to be clear - i realize these are for science. they shouldn't be edited for scientists.

but we should edit them :)

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

Also, I recall reading that those stars are so bright because they're within our galaxy... so they're the foreground really

crhulls• 4 years ago

Here is a Hubble side by side of the deep field for comparison

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10159217085846758&se...

throwaway57522• 4 years ago

My understanding is that it is also 12-13 hours of exposure for the Webb image vs weeks for Hubble.

pavon2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

Right and it's slightly rotated, 20-30 degrees (guess). Just for others that try to line them up

quaintdev• 4 years ago

A GIF comparing both Hubble and JWST https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif

wolfd• 4 years ago

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)

bdefore2• 4 years ago

The additional detail of the red spiral galaxy around 12:30 is stark by comparison to others. Any ideas on why?

ehsankia3• 4 years ago

Here's another tool with all 4 photos:

https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare/

mike109213• 4 years ago

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.

ceejayoz9• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

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.

mrandish3• 4 years ago

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.

loudmax• 4 years ago

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.

systemvoltage• 4 years ago

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.

Shadonototra• 4 years ago

This website is one of the worst i ever seen

Low res pictures on announcement day

fire this web dev

guerrilla• 4 years ago

Seriously, very frustrating and almost anxiety-provoking.

drewcon• 4 years ago

Hi res downloads are available on the left side rail.

Hikikomori• 4 years ago

Full Res, 14575 X 8441, TIF (136.99 MB)

If this is low res then what is high res?

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Nice night to get insomnia!

anewpersonality3• 4 years ago

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?

whatshisface• 4 years ago

There aren't telescopes big enough to do that.

ceejayoz9• 4 years ago

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.

throwaway57522• 4 years ago

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...

anewpersonality3• 4 years ago

Thats a spectograph

sephamorr• 4 years ago

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.

anewpersonality3• 4 years ago

This is a good answer, though incredibly depressing

m0giddo• 4 years ago

Here's an example of one of the proposals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft)

dougmwne2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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

pkaye4• 4 years ago

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.

silentsea902• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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!

yreg2• 4 years ago

I found Kurzgesagt's video on Optimistic Nihilism helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14

idiotsecant5• 4 years ago

Nothing matters. You live for a while and then you die, but it sure can be a cool trip getting there!

sillysaurusx2• 4 years ago

See also "Ask HN: What's the point of life?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866558

teh_klev• 4 years ago

It's like looking into the Total Perspective Vortex.

leeoniya4• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

It seems more like the fear of missing out. I don't feel terrified at all.

noneeeed• 4 years ago

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.

silentsea902• 4 years ago

Wow. That's genius

_moof• 4 years ago

Didn't work on Zaphod though. He just ate the cake.

layer82• 4 years ago

You’re aware that this is just the observable universe? It may be completely irrelevant relative to the total universe. ;)

mkeedlinger• 4 years ago

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

WhompingWindows• 4 years ago

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!!

alberth• 4 years ago

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most astronomy photos colorized (and not actually such vivid colors in real life).

bognition• 4 years ago

Yes.

The photon collectors on JWT detect infra red which is not visible to humans.

banana_giraffe• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

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.

deanCommie4• 4 years ago

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.

323• 4 years ago

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?

dougmwne2• 4 years ago

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.

airstrike• 4 years ago

Did you expect 100% black jpgs all around?

whimsicalism• 4 years ago

Almost all images are frequency shifted, often just to what makes things look cool. Still makes it cool IMO!

clint4• 4 years ago

Humans cannot see infrared light

astrange• 4 years ago

You can feel it if it's transmitted as heat rays.

willis9363• 4 years ago

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.

layer82• 4 years ago

It’s just your monitor doesn’t support infrared color space and therefore shows the wrong colors. ;)

brandmeyer• 4 years ago

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.

kryptn• 4 years ago

I've seen this comparison floating around for the deep field.

https://imgsli.com/MTE2Mjc3

slfnflctd• 4 years ago

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.

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

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.

mden• 4 years ago

The next NASA space telescope is The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/the-nancy-grace-roman-spac....

kentonv• 4 years ago

So is there any reason not to point this at Proxima Centauri b, like, ASAP?

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

sbierwagen9• 4 years ago

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.

yupper32• 4 years ago

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-...

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

Was worth every penny.

chaps• 4 years ago

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

rootusrootus2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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...

coldpie5• 4 years ago

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

bcherry• 4 years ago

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.

mrandish3• 4 years ago

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.

coldpie5• 4 years ago

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.

yread4• 4 years ago

you can also download full res (even uncompressed) images from ESA site (they developed two of the IR instruments)

Wowfunhappy2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

samstave7• 4 years ago

May anyone please ELI5 how to interpret the WASP-96 water spectrum graph above?

coldpie5• 4 years ago

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-...

vishnugupta2• 4 years ago

If it helps others like me, I found it easier to download the images through wget and then open the local file through browser.

ndm000• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

Aperture shape, so in this case I guess the answer is yes?

arianvanp• 4 years ago

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.

supernovae6• 4 years ago

The simple answer is simply because of the physics of the scope, the support arms cause diffraction spikes. The hubble has them too but is a smaller mirror and different support arrangement. Super common on consumer scopes such as RCs, Newts and big tube scopes that aren't RASAs

pwned1• 4 years ago

My god, look at the background of the first image at full scale.

jcims3• 4 years ago

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.

dredmorbius3• 4 years ago

In the Ring Nebula image, the two galaxies just kind of casually hanging out on the left side (just above midline), one square on, the other edge on, is pretty impressive.

There are a few others to be found (I suspect image duration is much shorter than for the Deep Field).

Even as far-from-primary-interest-objects, amazing detail.

j0e1• 4 years ago

“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?

Retric2• 4 years ago

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

sbierwagen9• 4 years ago

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.

The5thElephant• 4 years ago

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.

randyrand3• 4 years ago

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"

BurningFrog2• 4 years ago

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.

est• 4 years ago

I am wondering what size of the "cosmic dust" are. It looks like the size of stars but without emitting light?

LargoLasskhyfv• 4 years ago

I'm waiting for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation made by Webb. It's not the same object, but similarly awesome. Maybe the article gives you an useful overview of how different telescopes 'see', and how that is translated into pictures for us.

anshumankmr• 4 years ago

Anyone have the gigabyte size image of this?

whiteboardr4• 4 years ago

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)

roywiggins5• 4 years ago

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.

whiteboardr4• 4 years ago

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.

shitpostbot• 4 years ago

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

Wowfunhappy2• 4 years ago

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?

moffkalast3• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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?

whiteboardr4• 4 years ago

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.

bottled_poe• 4 years ago

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?

yread4• 4 years ago

Can it even open FITS?

randyrand3• 4 years ago

Because photoshop it not open source, not verifiable, and not documented on a scientific level about how its filters behave.

GuB-42• 4 years ago

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.

amelius2• 4 years ago

I'd recommend Fiji; it was developed within a scientific environment; and it is free (unlike PhotoShop).

dmead3• 4 years ago

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.

willis9363• 4 years ago

Thanks for 3. Without the explanation it really did come off as doctoring data to be more artistic.

buildbot• 4 years ago

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...

yread4• 4 years ago

I would have expected ImageJ has plugins better suited to work on science

clint4• 4 years ago

Why would you assume this?

deanCommie4• 4 years ago

actual science or some touched up version of objects in our universe.

Here's a mental model that I found particularly beneficial:

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.

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?

penneyd• 4 years ago

Very nicely stated.

djfobbz• 4 years ago

I was wondering the same...why not also share the boring originals that we can process through our own filters?

_justinfunk• 4 years ago

https://mast.stsci.edu/api/v0/index.html

Here's the API to access the boring original data.

beowulfey• 4 years ago

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.

Paddywack• 4 years ago

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…

supernovae6• 4 years ago

I use PixInsight myself, but you can do a lot on photoshop and a lot of people will take the output of PixInsight to touch up in photoshop.

Modern sensors are amazingly low noise. 10 years ago, I used to have to calibrate out darks, bias and flats just to remove my sensor noise. Now with modern CMOS sensors, people still do that but it isn't as necessary and you can overcome much of the sensor noise by capturing enough data - and that's where JWST just dominates. THere is nothing impeeding the data causing noise.

Shot noise is easily removed by integration, Read noise on modern sensors is almost non existent and easily calibrated out, dark current is extremely low, bias, hot and cold pixels are all things that can be removed with calibration and integration and with space telescopes cosmic rays are probably the most annoying thing but if you stack enough images they integrate right out.

But back to photoshop, the final images are just publishing art. I use pixinsight myself for all the heavy lifting, pixel math, integration and calibration but sometimes go out to photoshop for cleanup - especially for web/print.

matesz2• 4 years ago

Not to spoil anything, but anybody else here finding these results quite underwelming?

Jorchime• 4 years ago

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.

ceejayoz9• 4 years ago

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.

willis9363• 4 years ago

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.

twojacobtwo• 4 years ago

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?

matesz2• 4 years ago

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.

nullc2• 4 years ago

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.

omegalulw• 4 years ago

Have you seen overlay comparisons to Hubble? The detail is significantly improved.

zuzzurro• 4 years ago

I guess what I would like to get is some quick analysis showing how much further away Webb has been able to peek in the abyss close to the big bang. I assume from that POV the interesting part will be the red-shift measurement of the reddest galaxies in the deep field. So the pictures are "beautiful" per se, it's the accompanying data that is still missing

uhtred• 4 years ago

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?

boriskourt2• 4 years ago

Already answered in sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32072067

oittaa• 4 years ago

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.

the_cat_kittles• 4 years ago

the classic "hacker news landing page critique" applied to nasa, love it

VerminOctopus1• 4 years ago

I think NASA’s funding generally goes towards doing science rather than optimizing their Fortnite streams

dan_quixote• 4 years ago

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.

ehsankia3• 4 years ago

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.

lbrito• 4 years ago

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?

zanecodes• 4 years ago

(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).

pkaye4• 4 years ago

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.

datadata• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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!

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

...may have been a doctor on a particularly important call.

aruanavekar• 4 years ago

Great pictures https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2022/07/12/11110028...

FailMore• 4 years ago

THIS IS SOOOO AWESOME. So happy to be alive with this happening!

samstave7• 4 years ago

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?

smudgy• 4 years ago

I saw it and I started crying, it's beautiful beyond description and belief.

threads2• 4 years ago

hahaha thanks for the laugh

skilled• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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)

taftster• 4 years ago

So, am I to get this right? The universe, it's big. Like really big?

SapporoChris• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

tpae• 4 years ago

What is that brightest light?

divbzero• 4 years ago

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.

bdefore2• 4 years ago

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.

dang• 4 years ago

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)

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 4 years ago

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.

smm11• 4 years ago

This is the point in Contact when the crazy religious guy pushes the button.

peanut_worm• 4 years ago

Other than the big bright ones (which I guess are nearby stars) are all these things different galaxies?

perlgeek• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

k4ch0w• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

The points are caused by the support arms of the secondary mirror.

opwieurposiu• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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

AlexFielder• 4 years ago

Serious question: How do I explain this to my nine year old?

sbierwagen9• 4 years ago

Explain what? There's a telescope in space?

87tau• 4 years ago

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.

frebord• 4 years ago

Is there any attempt or is it even possible to correct for the distortion caused by the gravitational lensing?

NeutralForest• 4 years ago

Absolutely breathtaking that such a tiny window inside the universe would cover so much.

adonovan• 4 years ago

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.

mparnisari• 4 years ago

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.

amelius2• 4 years ago

I'd like to see some shots of Earth too.

WebbWeaver2• 4 years ago

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_...

WebbWeaver2• 4 years ago

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/2022/035/01G...

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G...

tempaccount2022• 4 years ago

cool

Dopameaner• 4 years ago

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."

grendelt• 4 years ago

looks like they changed the lensflare from 4 points to 6... a 50% increase!

Barrera• 4 years ago

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 1000°F, 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 3½ Earth-days.

pbj1968• 4 years ago

Sawdust and farts. Nobody leaves this planet alive.

imchillyb• 4 years ago

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” -D.A....R.I.P.

biggyjump• 4 years ago

<https://www.stsci.edu/files/live/sites/www/files/home/jwst/d...>

The science performance report of JWST is a fascinating read. Some of the highlights that sent me down a rabbit-hole

- On Predicted lifetime of consumables - Before launch, JWST was required to carry propellant for at least 10.5 years of mission lifetime. Now that JWST is in orbit around L2, it is clear that the remaining propellant will last for more than 20 years of mission lifetime.

- On Orbit - Orbit around L2 is maintained through regular station-keeping burns, which are scheduled every three weeks

- On observatory lifetime - At present, the largest source of uncertainty is long term effects of micrometeoroid impacts that slowly degrade the primary mirror.

- On Other spacecraft performance - JWST is now generating 1.5 kW to match the power load, with a capability of > 2 kW

- On Fault management - Of the 344 single point failures at launch, almost all of them related to deployments, only 49 remain; these are common to most science missions (for example, only one set of propellant tanks, only one high gain antenna)

The section on "Pointing and guiding" which mentions how complex sub-systems interact to achieve "line-of-sight stabilization" and how its not possible to test those systems together in an end-to-end fashion on the ground is interesting.

alionaguseva• 4 years ago

Hey! How about 1.4 Gigapixel image of the galaxy? The new photos are stunning. Let's Enhance's AI made them super high res for you to enjoy the clearest view of the Universe.

Download: 80MP/140MB https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5...

1.4GP/2.5GB (note: not every image viewer can handle a file this big) https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...

James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live

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