Inner geek: "Wow, the resolution is incredible! What an amazing technical feat."
Inner insignificant mote of life hurtling through the cosmos: "Wow, I feel so tiny and fragile and humbled."
NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
81–90 of 196 posts
Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#82Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#83Also look at the comparison to the Hubble image. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/st... Impressive to see the infrared spectrum seeing through all the background gas to the millions of stars.
Funny enough, if you showed someone these two images without additional context, I'd wager the majority would think that the left one was taken by a modern telescope in 2022 and the right one from an older one decades ago.
The right one makes me think of a cheesy 70's sci-fi paperback. The discrepancy reminds me of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy:
“But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now-now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.”
― C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#84Clearly Birkland Filament Braids doing a Z-Pinch to create the stars. This can clearly be seen in the glowing red regions, the only regions actively creating stars.
Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#85Oh no, It's The Claw!!!
"The claw! The claw is back!" (Gary Larson, 1982)
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/the-far-side-by-gary-larson--4...
Old Far Side cartoons now viewable (since a couple of years ago, but not linkable) at https://www.thefarside.com
Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#86I don't know if Space Engine or Universe Simulator have anything interesting with the Pillars, but I can comment on two games that do:
- Elite Dangerous lets you travel to the Eagle Nebula, but the developers have unfortunately decided that the Pillars no longer exist in the 34th century. It's probably a tradeoff to let them effectively simulate the scale of the Milky Way, if not all of its details. (EDIT: OK, stupid mistake on my part; they are 7,000 LY away so they not even exist anymore today. But I doubt that was the reason they're not in the game.)
- If you have a Playstation and Media Molecule's Dreams, I remember seeing a really cool 3D Pillars experience a few years ago made by player DrowsyBadger. https://indreams.me/dream/mwuocvFmnEt
Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#87*deep existential crisis intensifies*
Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically the comparison is not totally fair, that Hubble image was taken in visible light, while Webb's in infrared. Dust blocks visible light stronger, so background stars are effectively hidden from Hubble, but not from Webb. Here [1] you can see same field in visible and close infrared taken by Hubble. Webb of course shines in all the fine details and faint stars number. [1] https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archi…
Now I am intrigued, the infrared image from Hubble seems to be able to see through even more clouds than JWST! What gives?
Put another way: jwst sees both the clouds and (many of) the stars, while Hubble seems to have been able to see one or the other more clearly at a time.
You could infer from that that the thing jwst is doing better is having a much greater range of spectrum available to it at a time (though I don't actually know if that's correct).
Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#89Would it be possible for them to algorithmically remove the lens artifacts? I suppose just "anything with hexagonal symmetry gets deleted". They're kinda pretty but it's sad to think that this isn't what it would actually look like if you had really good infrared eyes.
I've looked a little at this in the context of under display cameras, which introduce similar artifacts. They could remove these artifacts and generate realistic looking images that are physically plausible, but the content in regions where the artifacts are present are under determined and require some "guessing" or artistic expression. Probably better for NASA to keep things closer to the captured data in their primary releases.
Re: NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
#90I don't know if Space Engine or Universe Simulator have anything interesting with the Pillars, but I can comment on two games that do: - Elite Dangerous lets you travel to the Eagle Nebula, but the developers have unfortunately decided that the Pillars no longer exist in the 34th century. It's probably a tradeoff to let them effectively simulate the scale of the Milky Way, if not all of its details. (EDIT: OK, stupid…
> humans will continue to see the standing pillars for another 1,000 years.