A small image that conveys vastness ...

[Ooloo]

Yeah, the whole launch and everything was pretty nerve wracking.. like 20 years of R&D down the drain if anything went wrong. Luckily so far apparently it's exceeding all expectations as far as performance. I wanna see an updated pillars of creation shot!

[Danth]

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

Yeah, the whole launch and everything was pretty nerve wracking.. like 20 years of R&D down the drain if anything went wrong. Luckily so far apparently it's exceeding all expectations as far as performance. I wanna see an updated pillars of creation shot!

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

[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.

[Jibartik]

can they take pictures of planets with this thing? Like this one of pluto, but in another star system?

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[Jibartik]

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

It's beautiful but also a little terrifying when you consider the sheer scale of what you're looking at. Even just the background is fullllllll of entire distant glaxies just chilling there... you can find the full-res versions of everything from today on the nasa website.

I wonder if it's all just a bunch of dirt and nothing else.

[robayon]

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

can they take pictures of planets with this thing? Like this one of pluto, but in another star system?

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No, that technology does not exist

[Jibartik]

Space? That much I agree.

[robayon]

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

Space? That much I agree.

the ability to directly image exoplanets in high resolution. It doesn't exist yet. I would love to see some of it, but I doubt I will in my lifetime, whether I get another day or another fifty years

[Jibartik]

so all the images are just CGI and the earth is flat, got it.

[robayon]

if that's true a whole lot of other physics don't make sense, including chemistry