69 Replies to “James Webb Space Telescope’s First Images”

  1. This is the only time you can use the word “amazing”. No, your concert, movie, pizza, cheeseburger are not amazing.

    1. Good RedPop comment. I will ignore all negative comments about this fantastic venture. We will learn a lot, it is a scientific instrument. Now I advocate putting huge telescopes on the far side of the moon. We can pay for them by inaugurating the First Lunar Bank. Much better than Bitcoin.

  2. We are stardust, we are golden
    We are billion-year-old carbon
    And we’ve got to get ourselves
    Back to the garden

    Meanwhile … the ex-hippies who penned and sang that lyric want to ELIMINATE that carbon. Pretend that it is a problem. So they can “tear it all down ma’aaaan”. Hell! They’re even tearing down our gardens … our very FOOD production.

    We all need to get back to the Garden … in more ways than one

      1. Lost Books of Moses-Amazon.com

        God Said to Moses, “Worlds without number have I Created, They are not Numbered unto Men, But they are Numbered unto me.”

        Don’t tell a liberal, They will grab a Calculator.

        1. The number galaxies, stars, heck, even fundamental particles can be estimated to within an order of magnitude.

  3. Weird – I’m not seeing anything like that on my “Orbiter 4000”. Maybe I should clean the lens.
    Yeah, that must be it.

    1. More than 20 years ago, I bought a reflector telescope from an Armpit College colleague.

      Apparently her daughter really wanted to have one for Christmas. She got it but soon lost interest. I’m sure she was hoping to see Hubble-scale images but that’s not possible with a 10-cm mirror. Sadly, the instrument was soon neglected and gathered dust.

      Equally as dismaying was that her parents were equally as clueless about astronomy as she was, so she got little guidance or encouragement from them.

      I managed to get it into operation and added a few accessories such as a clock drive and a solar filter. It’s not a spectacular instrument, but I’ve looked at sunspots, seen some of the cloud bands of Jupiter, and, of course, viewed Saturn’s rings. It’s also quite good for general lunar astronomy.

      Some people simply don’t have the patience that’s needed for that sort of thing.

        1. You’re welcome.

          And if you don’t already have one, a camera adapter for your eyepiece would also be worth getting.

          2. Keep in mind that you’d be attaching a lens with an enormous focal length to your camera.

            I fiddled with taking pictures with my setup a number of years ago. I got some decent photos–nothing spectacular, but it’s nice to see that those I took those with my own setup.

  5. Seems like a lot of money for some clearer pictures. A lot of hoopla for some pictures that looked just like the old ones, I like how the president has to trot them out as if he had anything to do with it.

    If we’d have spent that money on fixing our border or homeless crises, it probably would have been enough to fix them both.

    In the meantime, the media is dazzled. Look at the pretty colors!

    1. Admittedly, the JWST was way over budget and was well behind schedule. It came close to being cancelled more than once because of that.

      It remains to be seen whether the scientific results were worth the time and expense.

      1. Space exploration has never been worth the time or expense. The Apollo program was a military and PR exercise, not one of science or exploration. Bruce Sterling is right about Mars, and the Moon is worse.

        Too many “conservatives” grew up with Star Trek and don’t realize that 1) it wasn’t real and 2) it was Roddenberry sneaking his left-wing propaganda into the media by hiding it in a kids’ show where the censors wouldn’t notice. Mad at Netflix’s Cuties? Roddenberry did it first.

        1. Yeah, lotsa underage girls twerking in Star Trek TOS.
          I guess it must be that inter-racial kiss that got your panties in a wad.
          Then there are all the spin-offs from space exploration.
          Men have still walked on the moon.
          Neither the moon nor Mars can be colonized in any foreseeable future, but bases can be located there, and in space itself.
          Voyager has passed the Heliopause, and now we get to measure a bit of what the interstellar medium is like.
          If people like you were in charge, we’d still be huddling in mud huts and wearing animal skins, in Africa.

          1. One unexpected application arising from astronomy came from the effort to identify various types of galaxies. The algorithm used to distinguish between those galaxies and other objects, such as nebulae, has been used in the detection of cancer cells.

            Much of the technology we use nowadays had its first use in the context of the early space race. Photovoltaic cells were originally developed to power satellites. Integrated circuits were designed to build standard blocks of devices were used in spacecraft and missile payloads because they reduced the required size and weight.

            I could go on but I think you get the picture.

        2. @ Daniel Ream – I think you’d be astonished of how many “spin offs” there have been because of the Apollo space program and others.
          Just saying.

          2. There was the green-skinned inmate of the mental hospital the Enterprise stopped at.

    2. ” I like how the president has to trot them out as if he had anything to do with it.”

      Well, ahem, after he put Corn Pop in orbit, but before he was taking up space at Harvard, he designed a scope for his young son that would exclusively focus on Uranus.

  6. “I’m not saying I’ve been everywhere and I’ve done everything. But I do know this is a pretty amazing planet we live on here. And a man would have to be some kind of fool to think we’re all alone in this universe….”

  7. Psalm 19:1 “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork.”

    November 2019 we visited Kennedy Space center and watched the video with images from the Hubble telescope.
    Awesome.

  10. The observatories on Mauna Kea in Hawaii were producing exactly those types of pics in the 1970s.

    1. … and then we opened our immigration gates wide open (thanks for NOTHING Ted Kennedy) and the Chinese flooded into the islands … fouling the air and the telescope images.

    2. “The observatories on Mauna Kea in Hawaii were producing exactly those types of pics in the 1970s.”
      No, they were not. That picture covers a piece of the sky the size of a grain of sand at arms’ length.
      Also, Mauna Kea is optical, ie visible wavelengths, not infrared, as this picture is.

        1. Wow.
          Cars look alike too. So do dogs, trees and stars. I guess they’re all the same, and there is nothing left to be learned by seeing ones we’ve never seen before.

      2. In addition, the Mauna Kea instruments were ground-based, so some of the incoming light is affected by the atmosphere.

        Even with optical correction, there will be some details unavailable. That’s one reason why NASA was involved with the Kuiper Airborne Observatory as well as SOFIA. Flying the instruments at such high altitudes puts them above most of the atmosphere.

        Unfortunately, they’re expensive to operate and maintain. KAO was retired nearly 30 years ago and SOFIA will be closing down shortly.

        Even so, KAO discovered that Neptune had rings and found indications that Pluto had an atmosphere.

        1. Its actually a good thing that the pictures look the same, as its further confirmation that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, allowing us to continue to use the FRGW metric, for starters.

  11. Lickmuffin, facing another heat emergency northeast of Saskatoon at 89F with south winds of 23mph gusting to 34; it's the Final Countdown to the Climate Apocalypse says:

    I’m grateful that the Canadian Space Agency was involved in the Webb project, otherwise Bill C-11 would probably ban these images in Canada.

    1. That’s right up there with some of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.
      Seems that you are ignorant not only of how CGI works, but also how telescopes work.
      A flat-earther, or at least a moon landing was a hoax type, I suspect.

      1. This is not a good counter-argument mon ami. It’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying nya nya nya lol. Do some research instead of bowing to authority.

        1. I’ve been researching physics for 40 years.
          Not just browsing The New Scientist and other claptrap like that, for the interested idiot, but actual physics, you know, with math. That picture has lots of gravitational lensing artifacts, of things we’ve never seen before, probably farther away than anything we’ve ever seen before. It will spawn dozens of papers telling us things we never knew before once all the information in it is teased out by spectral analysis, solving the GR equations and so on.

          Debating folk who just dismiss that fact is much like shearing a pig.

          2. Reality is strange, much too strange for most people to accept.
            Like those jerks who say “We don’t really understand what time, or an electron, or light, really is” and think they’re sounding profound. They tend to take it amiss when you point out to them that we don’t really know what an apple is, either. In fact, our understanding of space, time and matter is much more detailed than our understanding of apples.

          3. “Gravitational Lensing Artefacts” would be a good name for a band. Eventually they’d just call them GLA.

      2. Everyone starts out believing what they’re taught.

        Only a few later question it, and put the facts to scrutiny.

        Most just adhere to the Five Monkeys principle, and many smugly assume a superior intellect.

        1. Yep. It takes a bit of intellect to be able to deal with tensor analysis, partial differential equations and the Nyquist-Shannon theorem, as opposed to the type who spin fantasies out of fallacies, you know, flat-earthers, creationists, moon-landing is a hoax types, etc.

          1. It aLso takes a lot of intellect to learn Klingon, and to create global warming models.

            But it’s sad to spend one’s time on fiction.

            To each their own.

          2. If you have ever used GPS, or any service that used GPS, like, say, an airline, you have used the equations of GR and tensor analysis, and implicitly agreed that they work.
            The computer or phone you use is designed based on the partial differential equations of quantum electrodynamics, thus you have used those to, implicitly, and agreed that they work.
            If you have ever listened to a CD or an MP3 music file, you have implicitly agreed that the Nyquist-Shannon theorem works.
            Just because you don’t know what many of these things even are doesn’t mean you don’t use them every day.
            You seem to think “model = wrong”, and yet what do you think your very brain uses?

          3. Don’t know what your point is Hiho. I’m not arguing against physics, I’m arguing against what is called “astrophysics”. No different than accepting medicine, but disputing witch doctor “medicine”.

            I’m simply pointing out that “space” doesn’t exist and this is easily provable. It is something you can test by yourself attempting to measure curvature over long flat spaces. It’s a simple formula – if there’s a curve there’s an equation to measure for drop over distance.

            GPS is done through triangulation, but it doesn’t involve satellites.

      3. To those indoctrinated into false belief systems, the truth sounds crazy.

        But yes, I have an understanding of how telescopes work. I also have a digital camera with 83x optical zoom, and have looked at the same sky as Galileo and Kepler, but with far more advanced equipment.

        Once you realize that what you’ve been taught about “space” is a lie, and what all the early astronomers had in common, then the truth will begin to set you free.

        1. The word for today, ladies and gentlemen, is “metric”. Learn what it is, and how its used.
          You spew the same tired pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo as the rest of the flat-earthers.
          I know, its hard when you know less about the world than the Greeks did in 200 BC.

          1. Oddly, ancient peoples built structures with amazing precision on ley lines over the surface of the earth. And this without any knowledge of supposedly living on a globe. Having only instruments that assumed the world was flat, such as astrolabes.

            The Mayans also built a calendar that could accurately predict eclipses centuries into the future, again without any knowledge of the earth supposedly being a globe.

            Ancient structures were built on Earth that still line up today with the constellations above. Which is odd considering the sky should have changed over the millenia if the world is a globe spinning and drifting through space. Especially if it has the “wobble” that Freemason Neil deGrasse Tyson says it does. (Why are all space spokesmen Freemasons? Weird!)

            And yet many centuries later, NASA still can’t predict eclipses with any certainty much into the future. Nor are they able to create a model explaining why solar eclipses move from West to East across the earth using their globe model.

            Unless they speed up the moon, and have the earth spin in reverse.

            When people pointed out the errors in their model video on their website, they quietly took it down.

            And replaced it with another model from a vantage point where the shadow was on the far side of the earth and could not be viewed…

          2. “Nor are they able to create a model explaining why solar eclipses move from West to East across the earth using their globe model”
            Utter BS. The shadow of the moon is not connected to the Earth, and not related in any way to the earth’s spin, ie it is always pointed directly outwards from the sun, it is NOT pointed towards the center of the earth, and the moon moves from west to east at the same speed the moon moves around the earth, which is considerably faster than the surface of the earth moves from east to west.

          3. I love how the Flat-Earthers try to use the conversion between rotating frames of reference and non-rotating frames of reference to confuse and hoodwink the gullible who don’t study physics.
            No wait, I hate that crap. They are effed-up, even if politically astute from time to time.

  13. First thing that struck me was the nice neat well defined white line that runs along the edge of the cloud. Kind of like something an artist would draw.

  14. Joe; that image is a composite of many images, i take it most of them taken with IR. HiHo ; please correct me if I’m wrong, but the composite wouldn’t be in natural colour(?), ie this image has been somewhat manipulated (in a good way)?
    If there is in fact a “line” it may well be of extreme interest to a physicist…
    Looking at the image i get the impression that what that line represents is the edge-on view…depth…of that cloud(?).

    1. Hard to explain how or why the line is there without having more information. Could be a product of the images or the images could all be fake and we would never know the difference. BTW I was always a big fan of space exploration. Just that recently the science is too much shock and awe and not really enough hard science. How many habitable planets have they found by the blinking of a star?

      1. “…could all be fake and we would never know the difference.”
        Yep, and you could be just a brain in a jar being fed sensory data, or even a very advanced computer simulation of a brain in a jar bing fed sensory data, or the whole world may be a simulation being run in a computer in the real world, which is, in fact, flat. That sort of reasoning leads nowhere. Nihilism and solopsism != healthy skepticism.
        You want the hard science, don’t look to anything the MSM publishes for amateurs, like Scientific American, New Scientist, or even worse, the Daily Mail. Find out the names of astro-physicsts whose pedagogical technique you like, and start reading their papers.
        If you insist on being spoon-fed, don’t be surprised when all you get is pablum.

    2. The image was taken in IR light. I would assume that they mapped IR light wavelengths onto the visible spectrum wavelengths, with a few tweaks here and there for readability, like shifting higher intensity parts towards yellow, or what have you. The reality is, the pictures are just a bunch of bits, and none of the light that JWST’s sensors see is visible to the human eye. The bits can be run through all sorts of algorithms, to get different data, say about red-shifts, frequency ranges, intensity, absorption and emmision spectra of intervening matter, etc.

      1. It is a wonder that we got this image at all, with all the ‘dark matter’ out there.

        Dark matter

        Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe.[1] Dark matter is called “dark” because it does not appear to interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation (like light) and is, therefore, difficult to detect. Various astrophysical observations – including gravitational effects which cannot be explained by currently accepted theories of gravity unless more matter is present than can be seen – imply dark matter’s presence. For this reason, most experts think that dark matter is abundant in the universe and has had a strong influence on its structure and evolution.

        1. Indeed.
          Dark matter is probably what caused all that gravitational lensing.
          The other major gravitational effect is called the galactic rotation anomaly, in short, they rotate too fast near their edges to be explained by just the matter we can see.

  15. I wonder if there any intelligent life somewhere out there in infinite space. Because there seems to be a shortage of intelligence on this planet. Anyway, this stuff makes me feel so insignificant. But I am awestruck with wonder.

    1. Because there seems to be a shortage of intelligence on this planet.

      Why do you think that intelligent life hasn’t announced its presence to us? There’s a reason why The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy regards us as “mostly harmless”. In fact, the Vogons aren’t too concerned about us once they put in that hyperspace bypass.

      1. To our credit, the “mostly harmless” description was an update to the previous edition of the guide, which had us down as “harmless.”

      1. “Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement.”

        -Red Hot Chili Peppers

        1. Yeah, those underwear-clad geniuses know more than any astro-physicist, and they didn’t even need a telescope!
          So, you say you don’t believe astro-physics, but you do believe physics, when they use exactly the same equations. Tell me, is it some distance cut-off that makes you fail to believe them? If so, what exactly is this distance cut-off? Can you point out exactly which term in the equations is wrong, and provide me with a better set of equations? I didn’t think so.
          I think there is a reason why the word “ball” is in the word “ballistics”, and there are no flatistic scientists helping to design rockets and missiles. 😉

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