It took Webb 12 hours to get this deep field. Basically 20x faster than Hubble. Or maybe even faster. NASA says Hubble took “weeks.”
Tim_N
5337
Thanks, if you zoom in close on a 4k monitor you do see a tangible difference with the previous high res file!
Very much this. The majority of people who joined in expected something spectacular. And this picture is spectacular, but the majority just can’t see it. The (typical) high praise but total lack of explanation of what we are seeing here and why it is so spectacular didn’t help.
Tim_N
5339
Typical humans.
“Here is an image of galaxies 13 billion light years away, which means it is as they existed 13 billion years ago.”
“Is there a way that we can make this more interesting to people?”
OTOH, we are talking about actual scientists here, not hucksters. Scientists in many fields have been justly criticized for over stating and misrepresenting findings in order to curry favor, win funding, or otherwise boost their standing at times. While, sure, you can think of tons of ways to make this sort of thing sexier, maybe it’s not the job of the scientists to do that. Most scientific papers of any worth are pretty low-key, focused, and measured in their claims, and for good reason.
If they expose the picture for longer, will they get more detail, or is 12 hours the optimal time already?
dtolman
5342
The longer the exposure, the more faint objects will appear in frame.
Well, we have the full press conference today.
That was just a “sneak peek” image.
Looking forward to 1030 ET today for a lot more info.
Right. In general, longer exposure = more photons = more clarity and picking up fainter details. The other end of that is that eventually you’ll saturate the brighter objects in frame (turn them into undetailed white blobs as you overfill those pixels) but I expect the dynamic range (difference between the brightest thing you can clearly image and faintest thing you can clearly image in the same picture) on Webb’s cameras are pretty large.
The real presentation - with scientists, engineers, and science educators to discuss the telescope, its launch, and the import of the images - has started:
The NASA presentation, with context and explanation, is infinitely better than the travesty of a “presentation” from last night.
We have water vapor on another planet!
Even though that’s been expected, it’s still a “holy shit!” moment on the order of when we first confirmed exoplanets were a thing. It’s a big difference between, “Our models say this is what things are like,” vs. “Direct observations show this is what things are like and it’s consistent with our models.”
So excited!
Do we know about the actual algorithm or image process used to get from the IR image to the false colours? Wondering it it’s pretty ‘blind’ or if it passes through the NASA art dept, where they say, maybe a little deeper on the blue, Dennis…
