Webb Space Telescope Takes Flight

Bambooza

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Tonight

President Joe Biden will release one of Webb's first images Monday at the White House at 5 p.m. ET will stream live on NASA's website


Schedule for tomorrow.

Tuesday
9:45 a.m. ET, Opening remarks by NASA leadership and the Webb team
10:30 a.m. ET, Image release broadcast Images will be revealed one by one
12:30 p.m. ET news conference that will offer details about the images.
 

Montoya

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Can't wait to hear why some of the image seems to be blurred.
Its gravitational lensing. There is something in front of that blurred area like another galaxy, that is warping the light. It may in fact be much further away than we think and the lensing effect is actually magnifying it, which is awesome!
 

Rear_Intruder

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I'm underwhelmed by the images, maybe they did not describe them well enough, or I need more time to study them, it did not seem anything really ground-breaking, the image of the exoplanet was not even an image just a chart of the light spectrum. What was great was NASA's production quality gaffs, the highlight of which was when they went live to the audience in Milan Italy and the world saw a cleaner mopping the floor of an empty room. But also bad audio, talking over VT clips, being able to hear the production team when the presenter was on air and the multiple failures to go live to other locations. I expect the NASA PR team will be having a stern debrief.
 
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Bambooza

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Its gravitational lensing. There is something in front of that blurred area like another galaxy, that is warping the light. It may in fact be much further away than we think and the lensing effect is actually magnifying it, which is awesome!
Never thought we would pick up on gravitational lensing, it makes some of the galaxies look like they are in a kaleidoscope.
 

Rear_Intruder

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Here's the website where all the images will be posted:
To continue my theme of negativity. The graph of the exoplanet on this official website has an image of a planet behind it.

Why do this if not to sex it up ?
Also reading the text it says " While the Hubble Space Telescope has analyzed numerous exoplanet atmospheres over the past two decades, capturing the first clear detection of water in 2013, "
So no ground-breaking science
 
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Radegast74

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To continue my theme of negativity. The graph of the exoplanet on this official website has an image of a planet behind it.

Why do this if not to sex it up ?
Also reading the text it says " While the Hubble Space Telescope has analyzed numerous exoplanet atmospheres over the past two decades, capturing the first clear detection of water in 2013, "
So no ground-breaking science
You need to change your handle to "Debbie_Downer" from "Rear_Intruder" lol...

Reading the press releases, the difference is that, because the Webb Telescope has specific IR instruments designed to detect these signals better, it can more rapidly and conclusively detect chemicals in spectra... see:



Reading the Hubble telescope releases, the scope had to take much longer measurements to get the same results.

Regarding the "sexing up of images" ... well, yeah, just looking at the results of spectroscopy isnt' going to be as exciting as a pretty picture, but, that's a problem for another discussion.
 
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Aramsolari

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Very cool! I was a kid when Hubble went up. That was a big deal back then. Fingers crossed we'll see some crazy images from Webb as well!
 
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Vavrik

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Sky Captain

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I'm underwhelmed by the images, maybe they did not describe them well enough....
The Hubble needed 23 days of camera exposures to capture the Deep Field image. Webb's image of the same area of space took 12 hours of exposures.

This article compares several Hubble vs Webb images of the same phenomena: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23202989/james-webb-space-telescope-first-images-vs-hubbles-epic-shots

Check out the increased crispness and star count in Webb's photo of the Carina Nebula vs the Hubble's shot of it, for example.
 
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