Slideshow: NASA and its partners unveil the first 5 images from the James Webb Space Telescope

It's actually MF. "Each of the detectors measures 4.7 x 6 cm, and the total size of the array is a remarkable one meter long by 50 cm wide. Each of e2v's back-illuminated CCDs provides a 4500 by 1966 array of pixels, meaning that the entire assembly represents a 937 megapixel camera."
https://www.quora.com/How-many-megapixels-is-the-James-Webb-Telescope

I feel you have a better plan, eh?

The images themselves will not change the mysteries of why most humans act the way they do. All of the problems you list are related to that.
The technologies involved and the desire to know who we are and understanding our place on the cosmos might if we don’t destroy ourselves first.

Would numbers really do that for you though?

I mean, can anyone "get a handle" on how to appreciate just one light year? Much less 50,000; or 50 million?

Yes, I think 16 light years is meaningful. This means that the thing we see is so large that any civilisations living there cannot really communicate.

The diameter of the solar system is half a light day. So, the picture is maybe 6000 times larger than our solar system.

The diameter of earth is 40 light milliseconds. So, what we see is 12 billion times larger than earth.

It is huge! Very huge!

@dmartin - Hate to break it to you, but you actually have it backwards. Squares (and cubes) are common in nature. It is one of the more stable crystalline structures the solids form into. Now a perfect circle, those you don't see in nature.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cubic+crystals+examples&t=ha&va=j&iax=images&ia=images

The originals of two of these are 120MP and 150MP

Deep Field (21MP - 29MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7DDBW5NNXTJV8PGHB0465QP.png
Ring Nebula (40MP - 29MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G79R28V7S4AXDN8NG5QCPGE3.png
Stephan's Quintet (153MP - 181MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7DB1FHPMJCCY59CQGZC1YJQ.png
Carina Nebula (123MP - 125MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7ETPF7DVBJAC42JR5N6EQRH.png

its all infrared

So the colors painted in are all a fantasy :( bummer.

Most astronomical pictures are in false colors. I would not call it fantasy. They look like they should look for someone with different eyes.

@ 4Photos: How do you explain "true" or "non artificial" color for photographs?

@4Photos:

"Fantasy"? Nope. You don't get physics at all, do you? All that blue light originally emitted by the furthest stars from us have long ago stretched into red through far infrared or even radio wavelengths, as that's how the universe works as the space itself expands like a sponge.

In other words, that "false colour" correction is actually correcting for how the real furthest galaxies would actually really look like, similarly to how you do correct for tungsten light sources' white balance in RAW. Nobody sane calls a WB corrected photo "false colour"…

Or would you really prefer totally black images, as your computer monitor is incapable of showing any far infrared frequencies, even if your eyes could see them (they won't, obviously)?

Just think of it as WB correction. Not so hard.

There is a great explanation by dr Becky Smetthurst on how we get colour images in space. You should search her YouTube channel. Commercial camera sensors have red green or blue filters on each pixel, then raw processors interpolate the full "true" colour at each pixel. Our eyes have red, green and blue photoreceptors and our brains interpolate a full colour impression of the scene.
Telescopes take thee images at different wavelengths or range of wavelengths. The image with the shortest wavelengths get assigned to the blue channel, Mid wavelengths get green and longest wavelengths get red. Overlap the three channels and you have a full colour image. The wonderful thing with telescopes is this method can be adapted to light outside of the visible spectrum. As long as you stick to long wavelength=red, mid=green and short=blue, then you have a true representation of the scene if you had shifted those wavelengths into the visible range.

@ aenoether: The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asked: Do color exist? referring to light as waves or particles in the outer world/the physical world, then transformed by vision into color deep inside our brain. His point: Color as we perceive it is a sensory response. I find this an interesting and refreshing question when we discuss representation of color. Different "blends" of physical lightwaves can even be sensed as the same color ...

All RGB photography is flawed! Your normal color camera is only an approximation. For several reasons. All colors in a color image do not look like the real thing. Moreover, a color photo is flat and nothing happens if you move your head. Same goes for that you have two eyes. On a color photo those eyes see the same. In reality, what they see differs. It is also possible to apply filters to the color image, changing it. Making it warmer or colder or some more wild stuff. With a color camera you can also record a picture when it is darker than you in reality can see. Is that color photography, to record the invisible in color?

The answer is that the result is a color image. The same goes for false color images, the result is a color image.

NOTE - that it is a difference between a false color image and a colored image. The false color image have real spectral bands mapped to RGB. That I call a color image. A colored image, where you e.g. take a monochrome image and map it to colors is a colored image. That is not a color image IMHO. This also goes for when old monochrome photos are colored.

@4Photos. My take.

Mapped color images are called false color images and are color images.

Shifted wavelengths in detector and redshifted wavelengths might coincide and then that galax is actually depicted in real colors!

Colorized monochrome images are colored images or fantasy color images.

@ Roland Karlsson: Actually, colour is a lot about expectations. If we feel that the photographic representation look life like how we perceive the outer world and interpret the sensory response, we accept the colours as "true" or "looking real". More often than people realize, we need to shift or grade colours on photographs, due to simultaneous contrast etc. to make them look just fine!

With the James Webb photographs, we would need to move billions of light years closer to the faintest galaxies to sense the "real" colour, due to redshift. Redshift is a physical property of light, though, so seen from Earth near-infrared or infrared is the colour we would perceive if we could see these galaxies from here.

@ Ze De Boni: Sure, scientific imaging use color to visualize and sort specific data. Astronomers and other scientists also need to make visually attractive images for PR to impress the general public to generate interest for their work. They have to tell how successful the use of money was, and by this hopefully fund new ambitious and expensive projects. This what the newly released JW photographs mainly is about in the context here - pleasing the general public.

and its all total speculation. since no one can really prove what they're looking at and seriously they can tell what it all means billions of years in the past and future? no

No aerorail.
if you took a bunch of images of random babies then a bunch of images of random children, then teenagers and adults etc.... (not necesarily of the same people over time). You would get a picture of how humans as a whole age over time and make predictions based on that.
When you look at the night sky you see the past laid out in front of us...all the baby, child, teenage and adult stars and galaxies. Now with Webb we will be able to see newborn galaxies. Plot a trend line and see where it's going.

Redshift is used to determine the distance of things hundreds of light years away and further. At super far distances, we aren't muddying the calculations with comparably-slow galactic velocities versus universe expansion.

Basically, we measure redshift from universe expansion while also trying to take "smaller" velocities, like orbits and so forth, out of the picture. Because of relativity, that works best on things *really* far away. It has some accuracy issues, but it's the best we have with objects really far away.

Parallax (geometry) is more accurate but only works on objects closer, since our parallax precision is limited by our observation points. The further apart our observation points, the further away we can measure distance with any sort of precision. As we get more observer satellites further apart, our parallax measurements will be more precise and we can accurately measure the distance of stellar objects further away.

As the universe continues to expand, almost everything is moving farther away from every other thing. I assume this is truer for the things that are farther away from us (like these 13b lightyear galaxies), that they are almost certainly not closer to us "now" than they were 13b years ago. But yeah, as others said better, scientists are very good at determining the distance and trajectory of pretty much anything observed in space.

Sometimes I think my dog understands what I'm saying to him. Then I realize all he's hearing is bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-sit.

As far as I understand, it is the "structural elements" that causes diffraction. This is a problem in all mirror telescopes. And for James Webb it is probably even more serious as there is no tube helping to stabilize the structure. I have seen it being denied several times that it is due to the hexagonal mirrors.

It's due to the support trusses *and* the shape of the individual mirrors as well as the shape of the final mirror array:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/

Light does not travel infinitely fast.
It took the light 4.6 billion years to reach the telescope. Therefore what was images by the scope was the state of those galaxies 4.6 billion years ago. Today they are in a different location and may have a different appearance but we won’t see the light being venerated today because it will take 4.6 billion years to reach us.

@jagganatha. I am not sure if you are joking or not. Seeing the past is not time travel. You see the past all the time. Light travels at 3 ns per meter. So, if you look at something a kilometer away, it is 3 us old when it arrives. But, even more important, your eye and brain is not all that fast, so it might actually take 3 ms more before you see it.

I don't see the problem with considering it a kind of time travel. An advanced civilization with a powerful enough telescope could theoretically be filming our evolution right now. We can't because we could never get the telescope far enough away in time to film it, but I don't see the problem with considering that they could "travel" to our past, just as we are doing with the JWST.

Sure, if one insists on narrowly defining time travel to exclude this, that's fine, but I don't have a problem with a broader definition.

Have a big long think about what I said. The Universe's bits all all in constant motion in relation to each other, so can we truly reconstitute beams of light that, if they still exist and have not faded to nothing, have been emitted from objects whose relation to us cannot be accurately described. Over the period of a day, even our moon reflects a circle of the suns reflected rays, & its just over there! Over a longer period it and we reflect our stars rays as an entire variety of light drawings, and every planet asteroid & star all do this. Like a medieval Papacy you imagine we are at the centre of events, but even time-lapse proves these alleged photographs are FAKES, because you would have to synchronize with each and every distant object to record it as a still (& i do not mean the alcoholic variety!).
WE need to consider all this for awhile longer, please

I think it’s fair to say the universe never existed precisely as we see it in this image because not everything is exactly 4.6B light years away.

But then you claim the image is FAKE and lose all credibility. You keep thinking about it. Maybe the reality will hit you someday.

You know, you could actually try educating yourself rather than calling out consensus science. Maybe when you understand everything that goes into that shot it would make more sense to you, maybe it wouldn't, but at least you will be able to understand the degree of your naivety.

Skepticism is healthy and important. Science depends on it. That said, you need to seek information when you disagree, not "go have a think". There is so much information out there you have not been exposed to that supports these trite glimpses into modern astrophysics.

Jagganatha - unfortunately I think you are just confused. First I tried to analyze your second post, that sounded a bit deep. But no, I think your thoughts are only a lack of knowledge. But, I can give you something deep in return that you can hava a think about.

According to special relativity it is not possible to define a common time reference that all can agree upon. And this is important due to the fact that the universe is expanding.

Because the speed of light is finite. You can't travel back in time but you can see back in time. Look at the Sun, you see it where it was 8 minutes ago. It takes Photons that long to cover the 93 Million miles between us and the Sun.

"as a photographer who does not believe that you can get a positive result if you multiply together 2 minus numbers (i.e. -2x-2= +4)"

Uhh. Wow. No wonder everything you said after that is completely incoherent.

At least there is somebody brave enough to admit that he knows nothing about science but still wants to share his opinion. 😅

Tell you what, the next time you see a lightning strike and you then hear it a few seconds later, you tell your eyes that strike was fake... Then go play in the storm with an umbrella.

When the main explosion of Krakatoa happened on 27 August 1883 the sound was heard in Auckland New Zealand - some 7,850 klms away - but the sound was heard 6hrs and 20min after the actual explosion - why? because that's how long it took the sound waves to travel from Krakatoa to Auckland. Were the folks in Auckland hearing something that was happening in real-time? No the people in Auckland were hearing something that happened 6hrs and 20 min previously - or in other words they were hearing the past.

The same thing is happening here - the light has simply taken that long to reach us from the time it was emitted - we are seeing something that actually happened billions of years ago - just like New Zealanders heard something that happened many hours earlier.

For your second observation - no light is being reconstructed - the camera shutter has not been left open for billions of years to take the photo. If I take 2 photos of the night sky 7 days apart all of the objects will have moved in relation to each other - I don't need to reconstruct all of the light emitted over the 7 days - and neither have I left the shutter open for 7 days. I have 2 perfect representations of the light as it was at an instant in time - just 7 days apart.

See gravitational lensing.

Seriously. What are you even trying to explain?
That the universe never looked exactly like this? Yea we know.

That the image is fake? No it isn’t.

The image represents the actual light captured as it reached the sensor.

Do you realize that if there is a lightning strike 4 miles away, and then 8 seconds later a lighting strike 1 mile away, you will hear them out of order? But still your ears are telling the truth.

Anyway good luck in your quest for knowledge. I’m out.

If, in addition to questioning this miraculous claimed ability of light rays to get through deep space undiminished & untouched for millenia, as though there was nothing at all in their way, we need to add what every darkroom assistant knows: that light loses its force really quickly. Your exposure to photographic paper quadruples every time you double the distance from the film plane to the paper, which is why "stars" dim as they get farther away. But consider this: that on occasion a star is visible within the Moon's crescent (as on several flags). As there are no stars between us and the Moon,what do we then see? And can this illusion then be infinitely multipled-"Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are..." as my Dad used to sing to me in the car when I was a little boy.
Like the "star" in the moons crescent, how many are angels? I consider Einstein wrong. I consider Quantum theory wrong- all just nice ideas, but so limiting: in a century they'll be laughed at....

That’s why Webb has a REALLY big mirror…. Duhhhh

So basic. (Bangs head against wall…)

Are you getting the drift of my objections? Astronomers see only the light, not its source. Astronomers indeed cannot tell if the source of the light still exists. CAN light continue to exist to be observed after its source has "died" or moved. Good Question, and one nobody has proven, a bit like -2x-2 making PLUS four.

Judging from the comments I don’t think anyone is getting the drift of your objections.

The size of Webb's mirror cannot increase the intensity of light reaching it, it just maximizes its possible sensitivity. This make it able to record very dim light, but it cannot create light that is not in fact there, that is done digitally, using CGI like in the movies, and what I am saying is not that Webb does not exist, but that the images we are being shown are the result of fakery because nothing man-made can see stuff that far away, IMHO. I believe all the claimed distances are incorrect, for starters. We cannot see anything with any instrument even a lightyear away, because according to how far a light year is that is beyond our capabilities :5.88 trillion miles
Cameras dont see in terms of time. Cameras see light through distance. The above amount is just ONE light year distance, not 4 and a half billion of them!!
Keep thinking!!

Hahahaha
Another anti science conspiracy theorist.
(I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.)

Bye bye

Jagganatha - let the humans continue to be distracted by fake CGI images and discussions of improved AF on Fuji cameras while we Reptilians from Rigel continue our takeover.

@Jagganatha
Photons do not have to maintain contact with their source.
Photons will pass through a vacuum without losing energy until they are absorbed by something.
Yes, photons, using your misunderstood verbiage, can last for 13+ billion years.
Photons are not destroyed.

“ so how can it even be possible that the light can maintain a straight path from a single object like a star, when, according to western science, the star that is the source of its static image's light will have moved”

Because that is the way light works unless it’s path is curved by the immense gravity field of a star or galaxy..

You might want to start by reading up on physics. Start with Feynmann’s book “Q.E.D.” and then work your way forward and back.

There's a lot of space, in space, and the light of distant sources is in fact often interrupted and altered by objects in between (like a planet orbiting a star). Many measurements rely on that.

@Jagganatha

Your profile says that you're a retired teacher. That scares the crap out of me.

Light is not being "recreated" here. Stars emit a lot of photons and those photons travel through space just fine because it's mostly a vacuum. The only difficulty, in terms of detecting those photons, is that they disperse over distance (not "weaken"). That's why they made Webb so damn big--to detect more of those dispersed photons and focus them into a clear, bright image.

@Jagganatha - you are using "light years" both as a distance and as a time. I hope you are not teaching physics.

He paid too much attention to the line in Star Wars.
“It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs!"
Clue - a parsec is a distance. Sort of like I ran the (American football) field in 100 yards.
A light year equates to 9.4607E+12 kilometers or 5.8786E+12 miles. But it is ----- a solar year. I hope this guy's students did not try to become physicist.

@PLD - Star Wars lines can get quite nerdy, don't go there :D

The Kessel Run was "normally" a 18 parsec route (as in distance). Supposedly Han Solo bragged about how he had set a record by navigating a shorter route close to the black holes of The Maw, reducing the distance to 12 parsec.
This interpretation is also confirmed in the Han Solo movie, that shows the actual adventure (anyway, it is just a movie, no need to go full relativity science on it, as it will crash on time issues).

Galaxies don't generally die in 4.6 billion years. They can merge or split perhaps, but the entire universe is extremely young from the "big bang to heat death" timescale. The spiral shapes you see take billions of years to develop. They represent such long timescale developments it's hard to fathom. Our own galaxy will eventually merge with andromeda, and perhaps longer term with the other small chunks in our galactic neighborhood but even then, you're talking about 5 billion years from now when that process would really start and we see from other galaxies interacting that it can take a very long time for things to stabilize.

Our own sun, just an infinitesimal small part of our galaxy, looks about the same as it did 4.6 billion years ago (coincidentally, that's also roughly it's age) and will, more or less, look the same in another 4.6 billion years (also close to when it starts to change into a red giant).

Yes, that would be nice, they have some odd colors, but not really possible. In theory you could paint them out, but the problem then is that you would enter false data in the image. I do think they could maybe desaturate them a bit, they have so strong colors.

I think they will probably develop some form of deconvolution to do just this in future, particularly for public-facing images. The problem is avoiding artifacts, which might be the grounds for conspiracies.

Well, to late for that.
I think the stars are already a signature of the telescope. They could do it for "art/wallpaper" stuff, but i guess the images marketed as "from JWT" would keep the stars.

It's tough to predict the RoI of raw science. Think of all the crazy derivative technology from the Moon Race.

the photos are a very minor part of the research and the ROI equation. Webb collects much more different types of data than any other telescope. For example, look up "Spectra data".

I think there is too much focus on how "expensive" the telescope is. I think it's the other way, NASA invests far too little into space. There could be incredible discoveries that could indeed have a s trong ROI if more research was done.

Someone ban this guy from these articles please.

I think Nasa's cost benefit beats most corporate expenditures pretty definitively. Next time you get hurt and need an MRI, think about the useless expenses in superconductor research that previous generation's tax dollars figured out.

Or, you know, flick a light switch on and behold the wonders of Nuclear fission, largely brought to you by government research.

No it's simply because if intelligent life does exist, it is at such an extraordinarily large distance away from us we will never meet. It has nothing to do with Aliens passing by our planet, having a wee swatch of it and saying "nah not today john, look at that lot".

@primeshooter: The math doesn't agree with you, at least by current estimates, that there is likely to be no intelligent life that we would ever be able to contact. Here's an animated youtube video that covers the subject at a basic level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE

@CanonKen
It's not the same society we are talking about.
The border is so sharp between this two layers of the mankind.
Also, the ratio is about 1 to 9, in the favor of m*rons, unfortunately.

NASA admits it is no longer going to develop, produce and distribute antiquated visible light telescopes.

My guess is the Hubble telescope is still useful. I will still produce beautiful images and provide date for scientists.

Given the fact that number of galaxies is almost infinity the probability is 1.

Heck even scientists calculated that milky-way contains at least 36 civilizations.

@zxaar -- inability of people to make simple calculations never stops to amaze me. It doesn't matter how many galaxies are there, if you multiply the probability by zero. That number 36 is pulled out of their a**.
You need to multiply the number of galaxies by the average probability of life in one and multiply it by tiny number, which is equal to probability of at least two of them overlap in time. But that is not the end, because the distance which allows for communication is also tiny compared to the size of the universe. So even if it's theoretically not exactly zero, for all practical purposes there isn't any other life in the Universe.

Well that is better

Lateral chromatic aberration could have been corrected by post-processing...
Bokeh ? The JWST takes pictures of objects that can be considered at infinity, so everything is in focus... The JWST was not made to shoot portraits.
Which app was used for the demosaicing ? Forget it, this NASA app is way too expensive and NASA will not give you the LR profile for free.
;-)

It's a mirror lens (like Hubble), so no CA. Bokeh might not be nice but, as the other poster noted, it doesn't matter because it's focused at infinity. The giant galactic gravitational lens (SMACS 0723) that JWST is peering through also lacks CA.

It's definitely impressive. Though I notice the Hubble image is noticeably noisier as well. Probably a combination of Webb having much newer detectors/electronics, and also cooling them to cryogenic temperatures.