First colour image from JWST Today at 10pm

Em3bbs said:
None of the colours are real I'm afraid -
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Correct, but only within the context of the original photos not being captured as a single colour image.

Em3bbs said:
these kind of images are an artistic interpretation of what they think it might look like.
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Incorrect, also in context of the subject itself. What school taught you science, demand a refund :p


Just like Hubble, JWST uses multiple filters to capture the various spectrums. Scientists then add the colour back as described above.
 
Em3bbs said:
The pics look great, but none of it is real. That was my point.
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Er, no.

Would you call a bat chirp not real because you couldn't hear it, but a camera recorded it? Of course it is real. Where our eyes fail is in the ultraviolet/infrared and so on spectrums. The telescopes help us to see this.

The reason why I said these images would look duller/faded in reality is because we wouldn't be able to see those wavelengths, but there would still be the visible portion of the spectrum we could make out with the naked eye.

The fact these wavelengths need to be converted to light we can see doesn't make them fake in the slightest.
 
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Just because the one project you might have seen over there decades ago might have used fake colour for various reasons doesn't mean other projects do the same lol, certainly not these ones. I mean even the NASA person showed today how they are applying R G B to various spectrums as the video above shows.
 
Scougar said:
I want to know what they would look like if I was looking at it though. Still very cool. awe inspiring.
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I've seen some space features captured unprocessed on a Nikon P900 and a lot of the creams and blues are there but often not the reds and greens. Or stuff will be overly red or green tinted (without a range of colour) - but generally stuff comes out as a slightly off grey cream with some brighter features having some blue in them.

EDIT: TBH I don't know how much that comes from the sensor/hardware on the camera vs what it would look like on a telescope - it has been too long since I looked at space through a telescope.
 
I wonder how many of those galaxies no longer exist, It's amazing but mind boggling. There's simply zero chance life hasn't existed elsewhere in amongst all that, I actually can't believe it's not teeming with life.
 
LOAM said:
I actually can't believe it's not teeming with life.
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It may well be. But you realise just how futile it is to even think about given the distance between just one tiny light spot to another which on a screen looks quite close, but is actually tens of thousands of light years of space between them, so the chances of a trip from one to the other even if both galaxies had space faring life that could travel at light speed would be insignificant as they'd all be long gone by the time a ship reached either side :p
 
Scougar said:
I want to know what they would look like if I was looking at it though. Still very cool. awe inspiring.
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wte9H.jpg

This is an image of the Orion Nebula through a Canon 5D Mk2 with a 12" Meade RCX400. Zero photo editing, it is just a 4 second exposure at 3200 ISO. Single image, no stacking.

With your naked eye, you would see the same, but without all the colour because your eyes aren't getting 4 seconds of data at once. Our eyes are terrible at detecting colour from such little light.

The biggest problem really is our eyes are terrible.
 
Tephnos said:
With your naked eye, you would see the same, but without all the colour because your eyes aren't getting 4 seconds of data at once. Our eyes are terrible at detecting colour from such little light.
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Good point. I'd forgot that above initially.
 
LOAM said:
I wonder how many of those galaxies no longer exist, It's amazing but mind boggling. There's simply zero chance life hasn't existed elsewhere in amongst all that, I actually can't believe it's not teeming with life.
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It probably is teaming with life but unfortunately due to the vast distances involved and also the age of the universe actually detecting them is near impossible.
 
To illustrate the light collecting thing some more, two pictures of M42.

MOfjy.jpg

zhE1e.jpg

The first image is a 30 second single image taken with an 80mm scope. With just 30 seconds of light capture, the colours start to really pop. Now do it again but stack the images 30 times, and you get a much more detailed imaged with different colours (second picture).

Looking at M42 through a telescope with the naked eye, you could start to pick out the colour of it, but that's about it. Your eyes work in real time so can't just gather light and retain it.
 
Tephnos said:
To illustrate the light collecting thing some more, two pictures of M42.
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Move over JWST ;)

EDIT: On a slightly more serious note though I always find it weird (though I mostly understand why) while these big telescopes can massively improve on deep field imagery, etc. they often don't provide much over amateur efforts for nearer objects.
 
Waited untill today to check some of this out. I don't really recall when it was i first learnt about Webb as it was so long ago. The delays and potential cancellations over the years made the launch so surreal. I'm so stoked for the teams involved, such a huge achievement.

I look forward to what new questions come out of this, going to be quite enlightening.
 
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