141–150 of 196 posts
James Webb telescope is great and all, but I have to say I think the older image is more stunning and more aesthetically pleasing. Cleaner, simpler, nicer colors, more mysterious looking.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_nebula_pillars.jpg
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/st...
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But if the hubble can take an infrared picture, that would be a better comparison point, no?
Webb observes "much further" into the IR [1]. 1. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/hu... (this image is from [2]) 2. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-vs-webb-on-the-s...
That's true for the entire observatory, but this particular image was captured with NIRCAM, the near-infrared instrument, which goes out to 5 microns. Deep infrared is done with MIRI, a lower resolution instrument. (As required by the Abbe diffraction law)
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Ignoring magnification and only considering visible light, Hubble imagery is a colorized version of what you could see if you could stare at an object for hours at a time while accumulating every photon during that time at a 0Hz refresh rate into a single image rather than just seeing new faint photons at a constant refresh rate.
Is it possible to visualize how a human eye would see Pillars of Creation in real time? This always confused me with Hubble’s colorized photos.
About what you'd see from a 16 inch telescope in a superb dark sky location. A red smudge with hints of finer detail.
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Ignoring magnification and only considering visible light, Hubble imagery is a colorized version of what you could see if you could stare at an object for hours at a time while accumulating every photon during that time at a 0Hz refresh rate into a single image rather than just seeing new faint photons at a constant refresh rate.
Is it possible to visualize how a human eye would see Pillars of Creation in real time? This always confused me with Hubble’s colorized photos.
We don't spend oodles of money to build sensitive instruments to observe things you could see with the unaided eye.
I understand Nebulae like the Eagle Nebula are fairly dynamic regions of space, so I find it interesting that we have photographs of the same region over a 27 years time span and at a glance, the structure of the Pillars of Creation appears virtually identical. I understand that 27 years is minuscule on the cosmic timescale, but what order of timescale would be necessary for the evolution of Pillars of Creation to be…
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Is it possible to visualize how a human eye would see Pillars of Creation in real time? This always confused me with Hubble’s colorized photos.
Scientists are unconcerned with that question. Your eye is nothing like the Hubble. Your eye isn't that useful for doing science. Hubble images are.
Can someone explain to me why the stars have varying hue to them; whitish, bluish, orang-ish. Is this due to the camera itself or the distance the light has to travel ?
All the stars visible in this photo are inside our galaxy, so there's no distance (metric expansion) redshift. The Eagle nebula lies near the galactic ecliptic plane, so background dust obscures extragalactic galaxies. When JWST points away from the milky way, though, its deep sky images can see light from so far away that the expansion of the universe shifts it deep into the infrared.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-...
The stars in this photo have six points. Anything without the diffraction pattern is a galaxy. Each of those smudges of light have maybe 100 billion stars each, and are billions of light years away.
The universe is big.
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Ignoring magnification and only considering visible light, Hubble imagery is a colorized version of what you could see if you could stare at an object for hours at a time while accumulating every photon during that time at a 0Hz refresh rate into a single image rather than just seeing new faint photons at a constant refresh rate.
Is it possible to visualize how a human eye would see Pillars of Creation in real time? This always confused me with Hubble’s colorized photos.
If you've ever been to a dark sky location so that you could see the Milky Way, then that's about what you'd see. Our eyes just are not sensitive enough to pick out colors. Even in a telescope, viewing objects like Orion's Nebula, which is incredibly bright, it is just B&W in the eye piece. Viewing Andromeda galaxy is also just B&W.
It seems like the pillar is lit from an angle? Is this an artifact of some other phenomena (eg higher density being at the same side of the pillars) or is there a nearby star shining on it?
