Wait – That’s IT? Just a few speeches? I thought we was gonna see some PICTURES!!
Oooo!
But … what’s that thing that looks like a part of a metallic sphere at the end of that big rayed stars 2nd ray? I have to be pattern finding, but darned if I can think of what it might be.
ETA: Ah! I think it’s a galaxy and a large cluster overlapping each other. That makes MUCH more sense.
Lensing
That’s what they want you to think.
I wanna see the look on Dr. Becky’s face
What’s amazing is when they said this represents a part of the sky as small as if you were to hold a grain of sand at arm’s length, then this is how many galaxies are seen in that small speck of the sky.
ETA - that’s what is written with the image.
Yes. For context, from what I’ve picked up on reddit, the hubble deep field (one of the most famous images of all time) views an area of space that’s like holding out a nickel at arm’s length. So this is a much smaller portion of sky than the hubble deep field shown in more high detail (and presumably with much less exposure time since the telescope hasn’t been comissioned for as long as the hubble deep field images took to expose)
It’s really hard to understand the significance without context and that press conference was pretty bad and gave no context at all, so most of the public’s reaction is probably just going to be “that’s it? looks like one of the pretty hubble pictures”
Looks like lots of lensing in that picture. All the streaks that are slightly curved. Obviously there’s a galaxy cluster directly behind the foreground one. Much futher away, of course.
This is the hubble image for the same area for comparison using the wide field camera 3 IR sensor installed in 2009. It’s not a 1:1 comparison because that’s closer to raw data, vs data processed for public consumption, but giving some context helps.
Edit: Anther hubble image taken with one of the other instruments, the advanced camera for surveying
Someone on reddit made a comparison gif of the hubble and JWST on the same area.
That is remarkable.
I had to work and missed it. What’s the verdict on the context? Did it help with the wow factor?
In re earlier discussion about whether we could get a deep field early on:
" This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks."
The famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image covered an area of about 11.5 square arc-minutes. The JWST image, AIUI, covered an area of deep space about an order of magnitude finer than that, peering much farther into the deep past and the earliest universe and with much greater detail. The science is fantastic; the way it was presented was sadly inadequate.
SMACS 0723 was chosen specifically because of the lensing - that way very distant, very ancient objects can be imaged that are otherwise beyond reach. The problem in the past is that these objects would be red-shifted beyond detection. But now we that we have an IR telescope of this capability they can be studied.
From here (also linked above):
You just saved me a whole bunch of work, as I had just started making the same thing. Now I don’t have to.
What would make the comparison even more useful would be to know the total integration time of each image. The Hubble one is much noisier, so they may have had to use extremely long exposures to capture the light they did. If Webb can produce a better image much faster, that’s even more awesome.
And this is just NIRCam. MIRI can see a lot further yet into the infrared.
People on reddit have said the hubble exposure is 11 days, and the JWST exposure is 12 hours, but I haven’t confirmed those numbers.
The JWST shot released today was 12.5 hours exposure according to the press release that described the image. Which is almost a joke when it comes to deep field exposures, which can run hundreds of exposures over months of time. I can’t wait until Webb really stretches its legs.
(I can’t seem to google up any info about the Hubble version of the image, drat)