281–290 of 410 posts
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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.
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?
Serious question: How do I explain this to my nine year old?
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 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.
So is there any reason not to point this at Proxima Centauri b, like, ASAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b
An obvious target for the coronagraph for regular imaging, but there's no way to get a transmission spectrum of its atmosphere.
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Producing an "image" of a black holes requires astronomical, ahem, resolution because they're so far away (thankfully). To achieve this kind of resolution you need an aperture of thousand of kilometers. The EHT images are created using synthetic aperture techniques to create an effective aperture with a diameter of earth's orbit around the sun. But this is only currently possible at radio frequencies due to our abili…
Thank you! Another question: are they already planning a successor to JWST? Is something better even possible? If it took more than 30 years, we should start sooner than later :)
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... is correct. No NASA planning, including for space telescopes, shows any understanding of how much Starship changes the game. Instead of one, we can put up a network of telescopes. And try out crazy ideas.
Here is a concrete example. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231032662_A_Cryogen... lays out how a 100 meter telescope could be erected on the Moon to study the early universe with several orders of magnitude better resolution than the JWST. The total weight of their design is around 8 tons. With traditional NASA technologies, transport of the material alone is over $30 billion and it had better work. With Starship, transportation is in the neighborhood of $10 million. Suppose that precision equipment added $40 million to the cost. Using Starship, for the cost of the JWST, we can put 200 missions of this complexity in space. Using a variety of different experimental ideas. And if only half of them worked, we'd still be 99 telescopes ahead of the JWST.
So where is Starship? It is on the pad, undergoing testing. They have a list of 75 environmental things to take care of before launch. Which means that they likely launch this month or next. At the planned construction cadence, even if the first 3 blow up, by Christmas it should be a proven technology.
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> “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?
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 e…
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 st…
> actual science or some touched up version of objects in our universe. Here's a mental model that I found particularly beneficial: All electromagnetic radiation is the same. In the sense that every proton/neutron is the same. But adding a few more protons/neutrons creates an entirely new element, with entirely new chemical properties. From something simple come incredibly new powerful behaviours. So just as Iron is…
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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.
Grain of sand at arms length for yesterday’s deep field.
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.
So is there any reason not to point this at Proxima Centauri b, like, ASAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b
"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-...