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What is Webb observing now?

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Re: What is Webb observing now?

#31

Post by _joel »

andai wrote: post #9
safety1st wrote: post #7

Quite fun. I was thinking it would be awesome to have whatever Webb is currently looking at as my desktop background or a website background or something. Glancing through the FF inspector it doesn't look like there is a single image which represents that, though. It looks like a piece of JS called Aladin is stitching together a bunch of 512x512 images. Anybody know more about this?

I think most operating systems let you set a web page as your wallpaper... or they used to, at least. Not sure if there's a way to make this site load full screen by default though. And I don't know if the "desktop browser" can run user-scripts...

Heh, brought back memories of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

Re: What is Webb observing now?

#32

Post by alexpotato »

safety1st wrote: post #7

Quite fun. I was thinking it would be awesome to have whatever Webb is currently looking at as my desktop background or a website background or something. Glancing through the FF inspector it doesn't look like there is a single image which represents that, though. It looks like a piece of JS called Aladin is stitching together a bunch of 512x512 images. Anybody know more about this?

The other option is to use Chrome/Firefox headless mode and take a screen shot.

You can probably then crop it automagically with some command line image tool to get you an image for your desktop.

Re: What is Webb observing now?

#34

Post by apawloski »

safety1st wrote: post #7

Quite fun. I was thinking it would be awesome to have whatever Webb is currently looking at as my desktop background or a website background or something. Glancing through the FF inspector it doesn't look like there is a single image which represents that, though. It looks like a piece of JS called Aladin is stitching together a bunch of 512x512 images. Anybody know more about this?

Not sure about JWST, but for Earth-observing satellite data it's common to store data in formats that support tiling and ranged reads so that clients are only loading the parts of the dataset relevant to current view.

My guess is something similar is happening here on the other side of that library.

Re: What is Webb observing now?

#35

Post by ziddoap »

Amezarak wrote: post #21
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But once the space race to the moon was won - and all major powers had proven they are capable of producing ICBMs - it feels like the energy and financing just went out of it. There's no more political or military gain to be had from space exploration so governments only put in a token amount, and there's only limited commercial gain from e.g. telecom, mapping and navigation, but that's all focused on earth itself. T…

> There's no major financial incentive go to the moon or mars, other than would-be space tourists or colonists that are willing and able to pay for their own trip. I don't think there's any incentive at all. What reason is there for anyone to go to Mars other than to say they did, at enormous expense and technical effort? Best case scenario, after spending tens of trillions of dollars, we're able to build a base that…

While I mostly agree with what you've said in respect to a Mars base -- I think you are leaving out a critical benefit of these types of endeavors.

The technology invented and/or adapted to facilitate these enormous space projects is very often applicable in other fields or daily life.

Some examples from the past include metallic glass (now used in power plants), translucent polycrystalline alumina (now used in invisible braces), water purification technologies, the coatings used on launch pads was adapted for use in coating steel for high-rise building projects, etc. The list is quite long.

There are hundreds of spin-off technologies, many of which are used daily, which originated from various ambitious space projects.

Re: What is Webb observing now?

#36

Post by RajT88 »

syadegari wrote: post #12

+1!! This may sound weird, but I can use this as a mood booster when life gets tough. Side note: I might be biased because I also find it useful to think about the vastness space to trick my brain falling asleep (I watch a lot of video astronomy videos).

“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.”

Per wikipedia:

The observable universe contains as many as an estimated 2 trillion galaxies and, overall, as many as an estimated 10^24 stars – more stars (and earth-like planets) than all the grains of beach sand on planet Earth. The estimated total number of stars in an inflationary universe (observed and unobserved) is 10^100.

IMO, a trillion is a number the human mind has trouble conceiving. We understand it only in an abstract sense - if you try to imagine what a trillion stars looks like in front of you, or a billion, or a million even, most likely you're imagining at best tens of thousands. 10^24 is orders of magnitude more abstract:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: What is Webb observing now?

#37

Post by jofer »

regularfry wrote: post #4

If I zoom in, I see a reddish mottled pattern. Is that sensor noise, background radiation, or something else? Similarly, if I zoom out to 30.39 angular degrees, there's a similar-ish green mottled pattern that's very prominent. What's that? It looks like it's got linear features, which might be a stitching artefact of some sort, maybe?

I'm not an astronomer, but I believe the "mottled red" features are distant objects that are redshifted. Note that they're almost all red no matter where you zoom in. That's the evidence that space is expanding in a nutshell.

Re: What is Webb observing now?

#38

Post by delecti »

syadegari wrote: post #13

Does someone know why the bright stars in the image do not show the hexagonal pattern that is present in published images of Webb?

My understanding is that the 6-pointed spike diffraction pattern only occurs on stars, and that the bright points without them are galaxies.

Re: What is Webb observing now?

#39

Post by skybrian »

I’m getting the impression that some people don’t know what they’re looking at. It says “Background: Two Micron All Sky Survey” which you can read about here [1]. This is not a live image. It’s just showing you where it’s pointing, which isn’t so meaningful for most of us. (It’s random-looking stars.)

You can read interesting details about the current observation at the top, though. Currently:

* A census of high-redshift kpc-scale dual quasars

* A 49 minute, 55 second observation.

There’s a link to the research proposal [2]

Apparently it’s a six-month survey of dual (possibly lensed) quasars. Gravitational lensing can cause magnification, distortion, and duplication of the image of whatever is behind it, so this is a way to learn more about very distant (early) quasars.

A quasar is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, so this seems like a way to take lensed pictures of a lot of early galaxies?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS [2] https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/program-informa...

Re: What is Webb observing now?

#40

Post by privong »

syadegari wrote: post #13

Does someone know why the bright stars in the image do not show the hexagonal pattern that is present in published images of Webb?

The background image is not data from Webb; it is a near-infrared image from the 2 Micron All-sky Survey (2MASS). See @skybrian's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769
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