James Webb: 1st images tomorrow!

[Jerry3904]

I almost put this into the "Success stories" forum because the whole project has been so amazing. For people who don't follow this kind of stuff, it will be worth at least taking a look tomorrow at the first images:

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

More options:

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

The very cool website to follow developments more generally:

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunc ... lorer.html

[Adrian]

Very exciting. This is a big deal for astronomy.

BTW, if you want to see how excited are scientists about this I recommend Dr Becky Smethurst youtube's channel, she has nice general stuff about astronomy and she has some videos where she describes what a big deal JWST is.

[dings]

I often use NASA. ESA ... pictures as a desktop background.

That is the purpose of every new telescope out there: new desktop backgrounds!

[Mauser]

[entropyfoe]

Jerry,

There will be a "deep field" image, 8 day's exposure I think, looking at the farthest galaxies at the edge of the visible universe.

I loved the deep fields from Hubble, so these infra-red images will be interesting.

[siamhie]

I recently learned of this from the Future Unity YouTube channel. This is their latest video.


James Webb Telescope Terrifying Discovery At The Edge Of The Universe!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJUPppjP1Ak

[Mauser]

Looks like it was created using GIMP. What say you? https://youtu.be/el8Go2Yyk6U

[PixLab]

Looks like it was created using GIMP. What say you? https://youtu.be/el8Go2Yyk6U

There is nothing in this video which can even suggest that GIMP was involved in any way.
Now downloading from the NASA website, it's clear that Photoshop 23.4 (Windows) was involved https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/file ... 23-5mb.jpg
OK... this does not mean that GIMP was not involved as well from the 64-bit FITS data as in a video from Pat David "Gimp Team hates you", he specifically said that NASA needed it.
Thus in the end we only know that Adobe Photoshop was used for the online image, nothing else

[thomasl]

I am not normally such a great fan of astronomy pics because they often show something that is certainly very colourful and does look super spectacular... but I have no real idea what I am looking at. But this:

https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-im ... smacs-0723

is perhaps the most amazing science pic I have seen, ever. Absolutely unbelievable. Zoom into it and the detail is astounding (and this zoomable pic is not even the ultimate resolution...).

Einstein might well have wept if he had been able to see the gravitational lensing of those galaxies. Humans are generally hopeless <redacted> but occasionally they create amazing things.