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James Webb Telescope - First Pics

Paratus

Paratus

Lifer
The first scientific pics from JWST were made public today. They look amazing
JWST:
220711-james-webb-telescope-first-image-high-res-ew-628p-44ff0c.jpg


Stephan’s Quintet
12webb-live-stephans-quintet-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg


Southern Ring Nebula
12webb-live-southern-ring-nebula-mobileMasterAt3x-v2.jpg


some pretty amazing shots.
They basically said the “deep field” shot at the top they took one morning. It would have taken Hubble days to weeks.
 
Paratus said:
The first scientific pics from JWST were made public today. They look amazing
JWST:
220711-james-webb-telescope-first-image-high-res-ew-628p-44ff0c.jpg


Stephan’s Quintet
12webb-live-stephans-quintet-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg


Southern Ring Nebula
12webb-live-southern-ring-nebula-mobileMasterAt3x-v2.jpg


some pretty amazing shots.
They basically said the “deep field” shot at the top they took one morning. It would have taken Hubble days to weeks.
Click to expand...
What blows my mind is that those wider blobs are entire galaxies. The scale here is just incomprehensible.
 
fskimospy said:
What blows my mind is that those wider blobs are entire galaxies. The scale here is just incomprehensible.
Click to expand...
Not only that, but if I recall another article, there is a gravitational lens effect going on, so some of those galaxies are behind the central point - objects so massive that the light is literally bending around.
 
For those of us that don't know astronomy, what is the main benefit? It is certainly less grainy then Hubble, but the images aren't drastically different to the lay person.
1657641505226.png
 
dullard said:
For those of us that don't know astronomy, what is the main benefit? It is certainly less grainy then Hubble, but the images aren't drastically different to the lay person.
Click to expand...
Resolution aside, JWST uses infrared light rather than visible light, so there are details and information that simply can't be captured by Hubble because its limited to the visible spectrum.

I think this is also beneficial as the further back we look in space/time, the more redshift occurs - to the point that some light will change to IR
 
dullard said:
For those of us that don't know astronomy, what is the main benefit? It is certainly less grainy then Hubble, but the images aren't drastically different to the lay person.
View attachment 64366
Click to expand...
Speed of information gathering accelerates the scientific process. Increased resolution provides more information, and the power gap makes it so previously unobservable things will be observable. A lot of this stuff is just 'fan service' for the layman.

Just wait until they do a 2 week exposure of one of the hubble deep fields.
 
dullard said:
For those of us that don't know astronomy, what is the main benefit? It is certainly less grainy then Hubble, but the images aren't drastically different to the lay person.
View attachment 64366
Click to expand...
What Fenix said, but also JWST can take this pictures much faster than Hubble due to how much more light it captures. Also take a good look at both pictures and realize how many more stars there are in the background of the JWST image. It's just way more sensitive.
 
dullard said:
For those of us that don't know astronomy, what is the main benefit? It is certainly less grainy then Hubble, but the images aren't drastically different to the lay person.
View attachment 64366
Click to expand...
To my naked eye in the Hubble picture, there are only about 6 maybe 7 galaxies in that portion of the sky. James Webb's picture shows me that I was highly mistaken there are hundreds of galaxies in that portion of the sky.
 
dullard said:
For those of us that don't know astronomy, what is the main benefit? It is certainly less grainy then Hubble, but the images aren't drastically different to the lay person.
Click to expand...
These photos technically isn’t what JWST captures. It’s the scientists that match up each frequency to assign colours that we’re accustomed to seeing.

But being this is an infrared camera, the signal it’s capturing has been travelling for so long that it’s no longer in the visible light spectrum. So even though the images “look” the same, far different information being captured here. As empty space is, cosmic dust actually obstructs visible light. So JWST will be able to peer through densely packed globular clusters and detect stuff Hubble just can’t see.
 
Paratus said:
What Fenix said, but also JWST can take this pictures much faster than Hubble due to how much more light it captures. Also take a good look at both pictures and realize how many more stars there are in the background of the JWST image. It's just way more sensitive.
Click to expand...

Heheh... you said stars.

For our audience, those are galaxies. Most those points of light are billions of stars, each.
 
That single deep field image was worth the entire cost of the JWST, for how it will advance our understanding of physics. The gravitational lensing will hold a lot of information for how space-time works on that scale, at those distances. Science got a big win today, even if it'll take decades and AI to work the problem. Lot more information in that image than people realize.
 
First of all, I am happy the thing works! It was over-budget and time to begin with. Then when it launched, there was talk of a high probability of it failing because it is so much more complex than Hubble and a failure of any one of hundreds of components would cause a total failure, with no ability to repair in space. Props to NASA on successfully launching that beast and getting it to actually work. I think people often forget how difficult these achievements are.

Second of all, yeah those images are spectacular. If that deep field image only took a few hours of exposure time, imagine what they could do with days. We're going to be able to image galaxies much further out in the universe with this than we ever could with Hubble. Not just because JWST is larger, but because it is infra-red, and all that light travelling billions of light years has red-shifted.
 
woolfe9998 said:
First of all, I am happy the thing works! It was over-budget and time to begin with. Then when it launched, there was talk of a high probability of it failing because it is so much more complex than Hubble and a failure of any one of hundreds of components would cause a total failure, with no ability to repair in space. Props to NASA on successfully launching that beast and getting it to actually work. I think people often forget how difficult these achievements are.

Second of all, yeah those images are spectacular. If that deep field image only took a few hours of exposure time, imagine what they could do with days. We're going to be able to image galaxies much further out in the universe with this than we ever could with Hubble. Not just because JWST is larger, but because it is infra-red, and all that light travelling billions of light years has red-shifted.
Click to expand...
Didn't some space debris hit it soon after setup? I seem to remember an article saying the impact would shorten its useful lifetime.
 
dank69 said:
Didn't some space debris hit it soon after setup? I seem to remember an article saying the impact would shorten its useful lifetime.
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Edge mirror segment. So doesn’t affect image quality at all. If it was a middle segment and a far larger particle hitting, then uh oh
 
dank69 said:
Didn't some space debris hit it soon after setup? I seem to remember an article saying the impact would shorten its useful lifetime.
Click to expand...
'Shorten' meaning 'the fuel we burned to correct the attitude means we get less future corrections'. That could be shortening it by a few weeks, or more.
 
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