The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Immature laugh

[Sock Puppet]

[Stephen Maturin]

BioWare did it 12 years ago.

Mass Effect 2: Probing Uranus - YouTube

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

The Space Review: Kosmos 482: questions around a failed Venera lander from 1972 still orbiting Earth (but not for long)

[JoeP]

Gripping reading.

[JoeP]

[viscousmemories]

Friendly reminder that the first full-color images from Webb are due July 12th!

Countdown to Webb's 1st Images Webb/NASA

[Ari]

I haven’t been excited for much recently, but I’m excited for this!

This test image is already a bit mind blowing and it’s unfiltered, uncalibrated, and never meant to be seen by humans. Taken by the fine guidance sensor these images would normally never get sent back due to bandwidth limitations, once used to keep track of a target they would be trashed.

This with its hundreds/thousands of galaxies, some literally invisible to the human eye, is a garbage image compared to the full sensor sweet:

[Ari]

Woo NASA scooped themselves and released the first of a set of images today with the rest tomorrow. I can’t seem to hotlink to NASA… eta: Found a link.

NASA Webb’s First Deep Field

this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground

To give a comparison of how much brighter and sharper this is, Hubble’s first deep field image was a total of 140 hours of exposure time over ten consecutive days, Hubble’s extreme deep field was 23 days of exposure time composited from 10 years of observations. I don’t know the exact exposure time for this image but it’s magnitudes less.



First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope | NASA

[viscousmemories]

There are some good side-by-side comparisons with Hubble in this article:

Photos: James Webb Vs Hubble Universe Pictures Show Huge Improvement

[JoeP]

The next 4 images released, from Deployment Explorer Webb/NASA:









I am quite pleased by the characters "-Crop-" in some of those 4000px file names

[Ari]

So awesome!
And now to unlock my iPad one must stare into the galactic abyss, but are greeted with a stellar nursery upon success.

[beyelzu]

Originally Posted by Ari

To give a comparison of how much brighter and sharper this is, Hubble’s first deep field image was a total of 140 hours of exposure time over ten consecutive days, Hubble’s extreme deep field was 23 days of exposure time composited from 10 years of observations. I don’t know the exact exposure time for this image but it’s magnitudes less.

12 and a half hours.

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.

NASA’s Webb Delivers Deepest Infrared Image of Universe Yet | NASA

[JoeP]

Imagine what JWST would resolve with 23 days of exposure.

[viscousmemories]

I watched the big reveal live and I probably won't be doing that again. The production quality was just painful. I was very forgiving since that isn't their primary mission, but next time I will just head straight to the image gallery on their site.

[viscousmemories]

Hubble -> Webb comparison

Webb Compare

[JoeP]

Hubble may think we don't care any more.

[Kevlar]

I downloaded the full resolution Webb images and pull them up on my 4K monitor and zoom in all around. Looking at the full size image it looks quite a bit better than Hubble, but zoom in and you can really see how much more improved the images are. Zoom in on those faint red-orange dots and you will see what the early universe looked like.