Higher Resolution Images available here: <a href="https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G7JGTH21B5GN9VCYAHBXKSD1" rel="nofollow">https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...</a><p>Full-Res 4537x4630 PNG (28.51 MB): <a href="https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png" rel="nofollow">https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png</a><p>Hubble's capture of the same area: <a href="https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73...</a> and a gif comparison vs the JWST: <a href="https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif</a> posted by /u/WhatEvery1sThinking on Reddit.
I'm impressed that one of the first Webb images was a deep-field view.<p>Hubble's own Deep Field image required about 140 hours of imaging (divided amongst 4 bandwidths and ~150 separate imaging events). Webb's own view took a little over 12 hours. I was expecting nearer and brighter objects to be first targets. Impressive as heck.<p>Though of course, Hubble paved the way and showed that deep-field imaging is useful and provides insights.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field</a><p>For comparison the SMACS 0723 image used for reference in the JWST image target selection nnouncement recently:<p><a href="https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/07/hlsp_relics_hst_acs_smacs0723-73_multi_v1_color-800x725.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/07/hlsp_relics_hst...</a>
I know this is whistling in the wind, but the Webb telescope just fills me with such hope and excitement. I feel generally so down about the state of the world, but when I think about the sheer complexity of the Webb telescope and how it has basically gone as well as anyone could hope, it just makes me happy. Deep thanks and gratitude to the huge number of people who worked so hard on this project.
Wow, you can really see the gravitational lensing on that one.<p>I was wondering which of the 5 photos [1] they'd tease today (remaining 4 are coming tomorrow). My guess was also gonna be the deep field one, especially since it maps nicely to the well known Hubble photo. But now it begs the question, how does this one compare to the Hubble one in terms of scale/angle.<p>[1] <a href="https://petapixel.com/2022/07/08/nasa-shares-the-5-cosmic-targets-of-james-webbs-first-photos/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2022/07/08/nasa-shares-the-5-cosmic-ta...</a>
My car broke down in Delta, Utah in Jan 2020. I was helped by beryllium miners who worked the mines in the area [1]. Beryllium does not expand or contract when heated or cooled, making it ideal for the frame of the James Webb telescope. Coincidentally, I broke down inside a cosmic ray telescope array named with the same last name as mine: The Lon and Mary Watson Cosmic Ray Center [2]<p>The people in that area are probably celebrating right now, just not with alcohol because they are mostly Mormon. If any of you are on Hacker News reading this, thank you!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.upr.org/utah-news/2022-03-25/beryllium-is-a-critical-mineral-mined-in-utah" rel="nofollow">https://www.upr.org/utah-news/2022-03-25/beryllium-is-a-crit...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.space.com/36975-telescope-array-site-tour-photo-gallery.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.space.com/36975-telescope-array-site-tour-photo-...</a>
To anyone looking for information about the infrared color mapping, it's buried on the webbtelescope.org page:<p>- <i>"In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W"</i><p><a href="https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G7JGTH21B5GN9VCYAHBXKSD1?news=true" rel="nofollow">https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...</a><p>You can reference JWST's NIRCam filters here. The longest wavelength this image is 4.4 µm, and the shortest is 0.9 µm (900 nm).<p><a href="https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam-instrumentation/nircam-filters" rel="nofollow">https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam...</a> (<i>"NIRCam Filters"</i>)
This image makes me <i>feel</i> a lot of emotions.<p>I don't know if its the same with others.<p>Just wow. The technical achievement is out of this world. Kudos to the whole team.<p>But the image is just..<p>Each of those points of light is a galaxy, we are looking at trillions and trillions of <i>galaxies</i>, across the entirety of the visible sky (this image is from an area equivalent to a grain of rice held at an arms length). It is terrifying to even fathom if we are alone or not.<p>Also, the Hubble Deep Field image took <i>weeks</i>. This took a mere 12.5 hours of exposure.
This is an extremely mind-boggling image, there is a lot going on here.<p>So first, one has to keep in mind that this is a composite with images from different wavelengths (exposure time 12.5h), so there could be some artefacts from processing.<p>Now to the fun part.<p>It is a deep field image i.e. <i>a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground</i><p>The focus is on the galaxy cluster (SMACS 0723) approx. 4.7 billion light years away (incidentally, earth's very age)<p>The stars causing clear diffraction spikes[0] are way in the foreground ... but the "reddish fuzzy twirled objects" are lensed through the galaxy cluster <i>itself</i> revealing what is way way back (the "redder the farer") --- that's where the NIRCam of the JWST now gives us some really juicy details of galaxies 13 (!) billions light years away, only a couple 100.000 years after the Big Bang. Compare this to the faint Hubble image [1]!<p>For anyone irritated by the distortions: gravitational lensing can cause a lot of weird patterns e.g. a "Einstein Cross"[2]<p>[0]<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike</a><p>[1]<a href="https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif</a><p>[2]<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross</a>
this image makes me curious about something:<p>imagine a distant galaxy, say ~1billion light years away (not 13 like in this new image).<p>imagine a civilization in this galaxy.<p>any information takes ~1billion years to travel between us and them.<p>but say ten years pass from our frame of reference here on Earth.<p>in those ten years on Earth, did the civilization ~1billion years away also experience roughly ~10years from their point of view?<p>I guess what I'm trying to ask is, in the time it took me to write this comment, could there be some part of the universe experiencing a much faster rate of time, relative to us? Did a civilization rise and fall somewhere? Does this question even make sense, or is it one of those things where relativity is so unintuitive that asking a question like this is nonsensical?
For comparison, here are some of the best previous images from this area of the sky:<p><a href="https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/" rel="nofollow">https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/</a><p><a href="https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/color_images/smacs0723-73.html" rel="nofollow">https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/color_images/smacs07...</a><p>That's the best original source I've found so far. It's also unclear to me if these images are largely from Spitzer or Hubble or a combination of data from both.
Here's a Hubble vs JWST comparison zoomed into my favorite part:
<a href="https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294/pho...</a>
Let's say the universe is 14 billion years old and the galaxies in this image are 13 billion years old. The largest the universe could have been at the time is 2 billion light-years across if the universe expanded at the speed of light after the Big Bang. However, if we pointed the Webb in the exact opposite direction we would see galaxies that are 26 billion light years away from those in this image. How is this possible if the galaxy could have only been 2 billion light years across 13 billion years ago?<p>Also, if the Milky Way galaxy was somewhere within the 2 billion light year diameter sphere of the universe at that time (it wasn't because it isn't that old), the light from this image should have hit us a long time ago.
It's impossible for me not to wonder how many species of life are in this photo, intelligent or otherwise, and things we can't even begin to imagine. The hostile environments, the ones blossoming with beautiful calm, and the frightening distance between everything in the photo where basically nothing exists, I'm having trouble even processing what I'm looking at here, it's just so... vast.<p>I'm excited to see what the other photos look like but even more, for what the next 10+ years of space photography might reveal.<p>If I could wish for one thing, it'd be some vast improvement in black hole photography. While I appreciate the recent achievements in even being able to <i>capture</i> a black hole on film, I imagine a photo as life-like as the simulated black hole in Interstellar would make it hard to not get emotional seeing such an incomprehensibly powerful object in great detail.
Don't know why, but feeling a bit emotional about the image.
Besides this first one, whole set will be released in 3 hours:<p><a href="https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html</a>
It would be nice to see comparison to the Herschel space observatory images from the same location.<p><a href="https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Herschel" rel="nofollow">https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hersch...</a>
Incredible photo from a scientific perspective. The team must be ecstatic that everything went to plan so far.<p>Truthfully I don’t think a random member of the public would be impressed by this photo. I’m surprised that they led with this during their biggest moment of public reach.<p>Can they remove the diffraction artifacts by rotating and re-acquiring, then doing some kind of diff/averaging? They are very apparent and distracting.
I was lucky enough to get to tour the clean room where they were fabricating the microshutter array at Goddard many years ago. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures, since this was before smart phones. I think that really helps contextualize just how long the development process of something like this is. And maybe what it could be capable of if it was built with today's technology.
What an incredible image and achievement for countless people who worked on this over the years. It’s impossible not to sit and wonder what life might be like in any of these galaxies.
Something to drive home how impressive this is - "If you held a grain of sand up to the sky at arm’s length, that tiny speck is the size of Webb’s view in this image."
"From our home on the Earth, we look out into the distances and strive to imagine the sort of world into which we are born. Today we have reached far out into space. Our immediate neighborhood we know rather intimately. But with increasing distance our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly, until at the last dim horizon we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed." -- Edwin Hubble
I am curious. What happens if they aim this telescope at some of the closer exo planets? Would we get images with atmospheres and such? Excuse the excitement, but that would be so cool!
As someone with formerly a connection to the astronomy world, I am certainly glad to see attention on this achievement.<p>But I also know that the science + research community should also be grateful for the general public's complete lack of memory or understanding of the science, that keeps them coming back and fawning over press releases like this and in a way keeps the field funded. (The cynic in me says thank the lord for the new people each year who get to rediscover the beauty of old images for the first time.)<p>For all they know, the image released today could've been a snapshot from WFPC2 HDF 20 years ago or ACS UDF from 10 years ago -- the images look basically the same to the outsider's eye! Very little about the image itself visually tells you that it's in the IR. Much like some medical research "breakthrough" that gets touted that could've been the same announcement from 20 years ago, no lay person really knows the difference.<p>Still, sincere congratulations on decades of waiting.<p>edit: No, I am not saying that the images are a repost... obviously. Read my message more carefully.
"Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground"<p>I had absolutely no idea that these images we see of the universe / galaxy were such a small sliver of the vast possibility. That is incredible. Does anybody know:<p>1. What is the field of vision on this image, and<p>2. what is the widest field of vision image that we have captured of the universe?
How about 1.4 Gigapixel image of the galaxy? The new photos are stunning. Let's Enhance's AI made them super high res for you to enjoy the clearest view of the Universe.<p>Download:
80MP/140MB
<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5H9VXV/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5...</a><p>1.4GP/2.5GB (note: not every image viewer can handle a file this big)
<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeXj3mjQ/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...</a>
Most of the curving stretched, I'm assuming gravitational-distorted, galaxies in that photograph seem to have a similar focal point for their curve. Surely that is not a coincidence. Is the body in the center of the photograph gravitationally distorting the light from the further objects all the way out to the edge of the photograph?
They seem to be really dancing around the fact of whether or not this is greater angular resolution than the Hubble ultra-deep field with qualifiers like "greater than Hubble in infrared" or talking about how fast it was. Does this image resolve smaller details than the ultra deep field or not?
Aren’t the rays of lights that makes a star pattern in the images an artifact of how JWST is capturing the light? Shouldn’t that be scrubbed and removed?<p>Also, why do so many galaxies looks “stretched” as if there was motion blur?<p>EDIT: why the downvotes? I don’t understand. I’m just asking some basic space / telescope questions.
Let's assume space is curved in a way that it only appears vast and it's an irregular curvature. How would you be able to demonstrate if an object in a photograph is another cycle around the curvature?<p>For instance, you could be seeing an already observed object at a different incoming angle and thus a trivial comparison would be defeated<p>I'd think if this question is answerable you could also perhaps demonstrate there <i>are</i> no cycles or repetitions, even irregular ones.<p>I don't know though, anyone that knows things care to opine? I'm assuming this is theoretically arguable, such as a proof by contradiction or something.
I am wondering if the galaxies that look extruded are actually stretched like that from some crazy force or black hole or something, or if the light is distorted.
The directions of the spiral galaxies seem to align tangential to the middle of the photo. Is that just an artifact of the image, or is there a reason behind it?
It seems almost impossible to believe there appears to be very little out there in terms of alien signals. Demis Hassabis’ argument that we would see lots of signals by now if other life had reached human intelligence levels seems persuasive to me. Almost seems more terrifying if we eventually explore the universe to find nothing else there…
Inspired tonight by this photo, I made this little tribute piece on my synthesizer: Webb Awakens <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mdhZ8yPdKarB8GHbWXToY9v_03v9NUU/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mdhZ8yPdKarB8GHbWXToY9v_03...</a>
The story behind the original capture by the Hubble is really incredible. This is kind of cool but I don't think JWT will have the same "damn this changes our entire perspective about the universe" potential.
Related:<p><i>James Webb Space Telescope White House Briefing</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139</a> - July 2022 (82 comments)
So beautiful!<p>So many questions to be asked and natural mysteries to be probed by man made in the image and likeness of God.<p>May such research give glory to Him who made the Pleiades and Orion (Amos 5:8), for His greater glory and the salvation of souls.
What is this "star" effect on som of the prominent stars? Why is it only on some of the light sources? What causes it in a lense in general and why is it not correct for in JWST?<p>Thanks!
With this resolution, I’m wondering if we could see some artificial structures made by Type 3 civilizations, or some side effects of them. Or maybe we will feel even more lonely.
Press conference of unveiling of images is 20 minutes away<p><a href="https://youtu.be/nmMRMIE3MGw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/nmMRMIE3MGw</a>
What a weirdly botched release.
90 min delay with nothing more than a title screen and a terrible repeating music track. (When it was at least an opportunity to display material related to the project for those stopping in due to media coverage).
A labyrinth of a website with interlinking and crosslinking throughout.
Web links that come up blank.
And an unprepared accompanying statement for the image given off the cuff by the director.
Weird press conference -- 'who is this for?'<p>All around, just strange and poorly executed from a communications/media standpoint. Completely inexcusable for an organization like this.
Who is flagging this extremely valid criticism of this photo release circus? I totally agree with this sentiment and it is something that science teams will have to reflect on for future communications. This was absolutely terrible.<p>interestica 5 minutes ago [flagged] [dead] | prev [–]<p>What a weirdly botched release. 90 min delay with nothing more than a title screen and a terrible repeating music track. (When it was at least an opportunity to display material related to the project for those stopping in due to media coverage). A labyrinth of a website with interlinking and crosslinking throughout. Web links that come up blank. And an unprepared accompanying statement for the image given off the cuff by the director. Weird press conference -- 'who is this for?'
All around, just strange and poorly executed from a communications/media standpoint. Completely inexcusable for an organization like this.