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James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
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Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Understood, i've been following this forever and am super excited to see where it takes us. I'm just saying we are allowed to admit that to us these pictures look like more of the same despite knowing that they are very much not.
Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Understood, i've been following this forever and am super excited to see where it takes us. I'm just saying we are allowed to admit that to us these pictures look like more of the same despite knowing that they are very much not.
To me they do not and I am probably also an 'average person who loves space', in fact I'm blown away by the results on display here and it is way beyond my expectations. From a tech perspective this is humanity at its peak.
Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#84The 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.
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.
Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#85Watching 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…
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.
Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#86So 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?
Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 .
If they pointed JWST somewhere for weeks instead of hours, would it pick up even more objects, or is it hitting the limit to what exists in that part of space?
Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#88Here is a Hubble side by side of the deep field for comparison https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10159217085846758&se...
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.
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.
Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
A GIF comparing both Hubble and JWST https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif
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)
This is really awesome. Thank you!
Re: James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
#90Watching 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…
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.