First Image From the James Webb Space Telescope (nasa.gov) 94
"On Monday, July 11, President Joe Biden released one of the James Webb Space Telescope's first images in a preview event at the White House in Washington," reports NASA in a press release. The full set of Webb's first full-color images and spectroscopic data will be released tomorrow on Tuesday, July 12 at 10:30 a.m. (14:30 UTC). You can watch the live broadcast of the unveiling here. From the report: This first image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb's First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies -- including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared -- have appeared in Webb's view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground.
Released one by one, the first images from the world's largest and most powerful space telescope will demonstrate Webb at its full power, ready to begin its mission to unfold the infrared universe. The first images will be added to this page as they are released.
Released one by one, the first images from the world's largest and most powerful space telescope will demonstrate Webb at its full power, ready to begin its mission to unfold the infrared universe. The first images will be added to this page as they are released.
Gravitational lensing, or something else? (Score:2)
Re:Gravitational lensing, or something else? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: Gravitational lensing, or something else? (Score:3)
Re:Gravitational lensing, or something else? (Score:5, Informative)
Galaxies at the furthest distances the JWST can image are more likely to have a massive stellar object or group of objects closer to us in line of sight, hence their images are more likely to be affected by gravitational lensing than what we've seen before from observations made by telescopes previously with less "depth of field".
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Maybe someone put a "swirly bokeh" [petapixel.com] lens on the telescope... :-)
I suddenly feel very tiny... (Score:2)
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To state the obvious (and leave the "Hitchhiker's" reference to someone else) - these sorts of images reinforce just how absurdly mindbogglingly big the universe is.
All those galaxies in one teeny-tiny slice of the sky!
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Eric Berger over at Ars Technica said that the entire image covers an area equivalent to a grain of sand held at arm's length. The thousands of galaxies in that image represent something like a millionth of the entire sky, maybe less. I've tried to find the exact area covered by it but no one seems to have posted it anywhere that I can find.
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so many bent galaxies (Score:5, Insightful)
there's an incredible amount of gravitational lensing going on in that shot, just wow.
Re:so many bent galaxies (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed! With Hubble deep-space photos, gravitational lensing was there, but was hard to spot. But with this it looks like Salvador Dali's Galactic Army. (Instead of Death Stars, he has Death Galaxies. Bigly more powerful.)
JJ Start Trek (Score:2)
JJ Abrams seems to be in control of James Webb now.
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JJ Abrams seems to be in control of James Webb now.
Yup and future images will show the JWST rising through dust, clouds and probably from an ocean ...
Re: JJ Start Trek (Score:2)
This single silent image has better narrative structure then Rise of Skywalker.
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Huh? I mean Stars Wars starts literally with the telling of a story set in a galaxy far, far away, and this image has that in spades.
Re:JJ Start Trek (Score:4, Informative)
I guess you are trying to make a snarky complaint about the diffraction spikes in the image? They are unavoidable - a product of the structure and physics of the telescope. (Background: 1 [youtube.com], 2 [wikipedia.org].) The good news is that, because they are pretty deterministic, it is possible to account for and at least partially remove them using image processing algorithms.
Unlike the lens flare effect liberally used by JJ, a lot of which gets added in post-production for...uh...dramatic effect.
In other words: don't be an ass, just enjoy this fantastic new telescope.
Neat! (Score:2)
*click*
Congratulations to the men and women of NASA, all the contractors, sub-contractors, and local food joints who made this extraordinary scientific achievement possible.
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Never underestimate the amount of work that can get done by a small group going out for a burger or tacos.
IANASS (Score:2)
Do the spiked diffraction patterns interfere with science at all?
It'd be ironic if some alien civilization built a giant marker thousands of light years across fueled by an entire galaxy to communicate to other life in the galaxy "we are here" but it turned out to be a perfect 6 pointed star and accidentally aligned with Webb, so we 'corrected' that aberration out.
And am I the only one slightly disappointed by the timing?
"We're going to release the first image 7/12"
OK well here's a preview image on 7/11.
Can
Re:IANASS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: IANASS (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean Clinton was president when this thing got started and if it has launched on original schedule Obama would be the one presenting the image. If there weren't the sail deployment problems Trump would have been the guy.
Presidents get to take credit for nothing but good timing. Just part of the job.
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At least you're not a frothing partisan. /lol
I guess you'd be called a member of the Biden-fellating army of social media minions, then?
Re:IANASS (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm naive, but I think most people realize that the current President's actual contribution is minimal. He is, to some extent, simply the spokesman.
I'm old enough to remember the first lunar landing in 1969. John F. Kennedy made the famous claim that the United States would send a man to the moon and bring him back before the decade was over. Lyndon Johnson was President during most of the time the program was under way, and Richard Nixon was president when it actually happened.
It was an expensive program, and risky. The Viet-Nam War was going on, and the Civil Rights Movement with people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was active. The Cold War was also a big deal, and I think the program was mainly funded and supported as a Cold War Ploy because the Russians had put up a satellite, Sputnik, and also put a man in orbit, Yuri Gagarin, before we had, and it really looked like the Russians were leaving the USA behind. Here in America it was a scary thought, and I think it probably influenced a lot of people in other countries, among those who were friendly and supportive of the USA, as well as those who were not so friendly and supportive.
Maybe you younger folks can't appreciate the significance of all that to those of us who lived through those times. (And who knows, maybe there's no reason why you should.)
Anyway, Nixon was the one who got to do the honors when the first moon landing actually happened and the astronauts returned. But he really wasn't so much President Nixon as he was the President of the United States. And now, it's not President Biden, it's the President of the United States (or POTUS if you prefer.) I realize things are very polarized in this country right now, and the notion of somebody just being the POTUS, as opposed to being that (expletive deleted) Biden or that (expletive deleted) Trump or that (expletive deleted) Obama may seem rather quaint. That's a thought that makes me rather sad, as well as concerned for our future. Then again, I grew up with the Cold War; I've always been concerned for the future.
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Maybe I'm naive, but I think most people realize that the current President's actual contribution is minimal. He is, to some extent, simply the spokesman.
Well, they do pick the NASA administrators, so there's that. Of course, most of the work was under a combination of President George H.W. Bush's nominee (because President Clinton kept him on all the way into the start of George W. Bush's term), George W. Bush's two nominees and two interim administrators, Barack Obama's nominee, and the associate administrator under his nominee who was promoted to interim administrator as soon as Trump took office.
Amusingly, that interim administrator, whose first job was
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it's pretty easy to fix: rotate the telescope around it's central axis, rotate the image back, and compare. The diffraction patterns move with the mirror, the real stuff out there doesn't. So you do the math and cancel it out.
It'd take something out there rotating at exactly the rate we happen to pick for the telescope to have a mistake from it.
OTOH, it takes additional observations, so we'll be seeing plenty of less-processed images with the artifacts too.
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An extended object wouldn't make the same spike pattern as a point source, even if it was exactly the shape of the spike pattern. You might not get a perfect rendition, but you'd get something really weird and you could followup with another observation after rotating the telescope.
The spikes are really only prominent in very bright foreground objects that saturate the cameras anyway.
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Do the spiked diffraction patterns interfere with science at all?
No. Firstly for analysis of the images the diffraction spikes expected can be calculated based on knowledge of the optics of the telescope and excluded.
Secondly, diffraction spikes have a great benefit of being able to help with image analysis. The core of a star being largely blown out, the spike can be used for judging emission spectra. But that only applies to cheap telescopes, the JWST has a dedicated instrument for this task :-)
Colors? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Colors? (Score:5, Informative)
They color the longest wavelength data red, the mid-range wavelength green, and the shortest wavelength (which might be visible as deep red in reality) blue. That's the standard way of arranging any "colors" from outside the optical band.
Re:Colors? (Score:4, Informative)
In other words, they blue-shifted the image back into the visible spectrum, which I'm sure would do a decent job of counteracting at least some of the extreme red-shift you get from observing such distant objects.
Whether they actually tried to calibrate the blue-shifting (e.g. by looking for emission spectra), I don't know, but I'm sure it wouldn't be out of the question.
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Emission spectra are being taken by another instrument, so it is possible that data could be overlaid onto the other data to add color. But that's not what they're doing yet at least.
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In other words, they blue-shifted the image back into the visible spectrum...
Based on the explanation given by Mal-2, it sounds like it could involve more than just shifting. There could be some compression (or expansion) of the overall range of frequencies to fit over the visible color range.
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That's the standard way of arranging any "colors" from outside the optical band.
There's nothing standard about the arranging of any colours from astronomy. Some images come in false colour shifted like you explain. Some are false colour with filtered elements overlaid and assigned to specific channels. And some (arguably the most famous pictures of space we have) have nothing to do with shortening, nor arranging in a specific order, but rather photographing objects with specific filters and assigning emission spectra to specific colour channels.
There is no standard for doing this, and
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You are correct, by "standard" I should have said "default", as in "this is how they'll do it if there's no particular reason to do otherwise and no time to give it deeper thought".
Re:Colors? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a NIRCam image, so infrared in the 0.6 to 5 micron range. Several different filters were used to capture the many images that were composited to make the colour one. One of the preview images tells you what filters were mapped to what colour (at the bottom): https://webbtelescope.org/cont... [webbtelescope.org]
And here's the filter info: https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jw... [stsci.edu]
The visual spectrum is very small so if you're imaging things outside it it's pretty rare that you can just shift frequencies to get a colour image, and you probably wouldn't want to anyway. NIRCam's range is about 12 times the entire visual spectrum.
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Here we go: this better explains the colors. There were three images overlaid, but each one had two wavelengths taken simultaneously, so there are six "colors" in all.
https://youtu.be/5sMZw_DM5eA?t... [youtu.be]
What's with the 6 spikes on some of the points? (Score:2)
I understand that it's an artifact of the way the telescope lens is constructed, but I'm very confused why there are spikes on only some of the stars and not all of the points of light?
If they can be removed as a post-processing stage, then why didn't they do it throughout the entire image? What is it about the points of light that have spikes that differentiates from those that do not?
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D'oh!
Realized this literally as soon as pressed "Submit"...
I meant "mirror", not "lens"
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It is all of them. There are diffraction spikes on every light source. It's just that like the "a duck's quack doesn't echo" urban legend, some of the smallest spikes are being hidden within the fuzziness of the object itself.
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The spikes are much dimmer than the central object so you don't really see them on objects that are properly exposed. You do see the spikes around objects that are so bright they saturate the camera, mostly foreground stars.
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Quoted for unintentional hilarity. The failed to censor those imperfections.
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The obvious ones in the picture are stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. (saw it mentioned somewhere)
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Right, this is the correct answer. The bright ones are stars close to us. Al the other things you see are galaxies. Maybe also quasars.
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The spikes appear on point sources. On galaxies, they're smeared out over a large area and generally aren't bright enough to show up.
I so wish somebody hacked it and (Score:1)
...substituted a photo of a creepy looking alien making obscene gestures. Or galaxies spelling out "Elon Musk was Here".
Compare with Hubble's version (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(Doesn't appear to be the same region of sky)
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(Doesn't appear to be the same region of sky)
The Hubble HUDF photo is in the constellation Fornax. Webb's is in the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 in the constellation Volans.
Both regions are visible from the southern hemisphere. Formax in SQ1 and Volans in SQ2.
Seriously, no one had this reaction... (Score:2)
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It's a good line for sure. Galaxies! even.
There is no god! (Score:2)
If you don't look at that image and your first reaction isn't immediately "There is no god!" then your brain is utterly defective.
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> If you don't look at that image and your first reaction isn't immediately "There is no god!" then your brain is utterly defective.
Have you tried DMT?
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I'm curious as to how you think the image is evidence for or against the existence of a god. If your first reaction to an image of distant celestial objects is to jump to arguments about existence of deities, I wouldn't be confident in your reasoning skills.
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After 7 mushrooms I finally got it.
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Yeah, I think the Parent has a puzzling take, too.
As an agnostic, I think certainty is an unethical position. It tends to lead both believers and non-believers to want to impose their view on others. But I don't need you to take my thoughts on it. Find your own path.
My first thought was amazement, then astonishment that every time I look deeper the universe gets orders of magnitude bigger in my estimation. Then profound gratitude that I live in a time (and have lived long enough) to see this.
But that I fee
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Atheist: there is no such thing as a unicorn that can fly and breathe fire.
Agnostic: I've never seen one, but there might be.
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I'm a devout evangelical atheist, and I can assume you my brain is not utterly defective. It's certainly possible to look at this and be amazed at the big bang that brought these structures into being. No need to posit a god.
Likewise, I could say that your brain is utterly defective if you don't wonder about whatever it was that created God. Because if the amazing universe's complexity is a sign that something created it, imagine the complexity of whatever it was that created God!
Re:There is no god! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well that is an easy answer - people created God.
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your first reaction isn't immediately "There is no god!" then your brain is utterly defective
As an agnostic living in a secular nation, I find your immediate reaction curious.
Where did Mohammad touch you?
Wild (Score:1)
Galileo (Score:2)
This is a phenomenal image. I can't wait to see more. Can you imagine the utter awe that this would have inspired in the pioneers like Galileo, Messier, the Herschels, and others? I remember thinking as a young scientist how gravitational lensing was this rare event that astronomers are lucky to see. Now there's this image where it's ubiquitous.
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distortion vs lensing (Score:2)
I wonder what is distortion vs lensing. There almost seems to be a diagonal line across the image suggesting maybe a distortion, be nice to get an explanation of the effects here.
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How do you use those terms? Gravitational Lensing is nothing more than a form of distortion since it bends light.
But what you're seeing here is lensing, why it appears diagonally would have largely to do with the lens itself. A galaxy is used for this, and you can see the lens follows the elongated shape of the central galaxy which clearly has some stars (and thus gravity) which extends diagonally across the image visible as a slight haze.
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in this context, lensing being the observed affect and distortion being a property of the telescope. The diagonal effect here doesn't seem to correlate with any massive body in the image and doesn't follow the galactic plane (which wouldn't be enough gravity for this effect anyway)
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Not sure what you are looking at but I'm looking at this. https://imgur.com/a/VoaHF9Y [imgur.com] The lensing absolutely follows the elongated shape of the galaxy.
If you think this is distortion in the optics itself, then it would have been visible in the many images we've seen over the past few months. It's not. It's gravitational lensing.
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no, that's a good 20-30 degrees off axis.
What is the actual field of view? (Score:1)
Can someone convert "a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground" to arcseconds for me?
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It's like eleven Olympic sized swimming pools placed the distance of the moon. Helpful?
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A 0.1 mm grain of sand held at 1 m distance is about 21 arcseconds.
Re:What is the actual field of view? (Score:5, Informative)
This image [stsci.edu] lays out the FOV for all the instruments. For comparison, the full moon is about 30 arcminutes across.
Am I the only one not impressed? (Score:2)
What is new here? I see the same things I expect. Galaxies, nebulae and bright stars. I see that it is a very clear image, but there is nothing _new_ in this image.
If I am missing something, please, give me a short description?
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Well yeah, almost everything in this photo is older than you are. But we could not see it before and now we can so it's new to us.
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Yes, you're the only one not impressed by seeing things that we've never been able to see before. Hint: We've never imaged a gravitational lens of this magnitude before because we haven't been able to see far enough behind it.
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https://esahubble.org/images/h... [esahubble.org]
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The Webb will do shots just like that. It's fundamentally exactly what it was built for, observation of the deep field.
However if you want an indication of what it may look like then look at this photo side by side with Hubble's: https://petapixel.com/2022/07/... [petapixel.com]
Also note that the JWST exposure is 12hours, and the Hubble's exposure was 10days.
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A useful point of comparison is that the Hubble deep field images [google.com] - the kind where all you see are galaxies upon galaxies - take days to weeks of accumulated observation time. This image is the result of 12.5 h
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It looks like someone did just that and showed a video.
https://twitter.com/AlyssaAGoo... [twitter.com]
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You find funny things if you zoom in! (Score:2)
https://twitter.com/david_pica... [twitter.com]
Sorry, I had to...