A small image that conveys vastness ...

[Ooloo]

Originally Posted by Danth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Doesn't the new one operate mainly in infared? That's helpful for a scientific instrument but might not be quite so good as Hubble is for producing beautiful images for public consumption.

Danth

Yeah but nearly every image of space you've ever seen is a composite of RGB filters, it's the same process. Webb *has* to detect infrared because the targets it wants to image are so far away the light has been redshifted beyond the visible spectrum (to humans). But because humans are real smart, we can translate that data into what they *would* look like in the visible spectrum if they were closer to us. Hubble's images of the same targets don't look radically different at all, just blurrier.