Deep field image not released until tomorrow :(.
One of the projects I was most proud of at NASA was the posting of images of the comet Shoemaker-Levy the week of July 16-24, 1994. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/sl9/ At this point in time, the web was about 15 months old, and web pages were static pages with tiny images a little smaller than a business card on screen. We set up a series of UNIX HTTP servers with the static web page content, and then a whole phalanx of 15(?) back-end machines that held the images. In the static HTML page was a randomizer that selected a number from 1-15, and pulled the images from that back-end server with that ID. This was the first time anyone had done distributed load balancing for a web site. Prior to this, all web sites - static page content, images, everything - were delivered within the same HTML page, and were all downloaded from the same server. Image load times got pretty slow, when people were hammering the servers looking for the images as they came back from various satellites and telescopes... but it never went down. And throughout that week, we iterated on those back end scripts, and pretty much defined the "dynamic web page". I went around to various places speaking on how we did it, showing the code, and helping other organizations and people build similar dynamism into their web pages. Pretty groovy to see where we have come from there, and how the JWST images are so thrilling and being shared amongst even the non-space-nerd community!!
I'm excited! Waiting up watching the live stream from Nasa now. Tomorrow I plan to watch Launch Pad Astronomy's stream. He has a very good series of videos about the JWST, playlist here. :)
TL;DW: James Webb is already completely upending our models of cosmology, and it hasn't even really tried yet: I wanna point the thing at the edge of universe for 12 days, not just 12 hours like was used for the first Webb deep field. Just to see if any ghosts come up out of the noise floor. But I doubt that will happen for a looooong time, because telescope time is precious, and there are many other low-hanging fruit objectives to tick off in the meantime. Dear god, does this thing fucking work.
As usual, Anton and I very much agree: X-posting a website that allows for comparing new and old astro pics, I assume it will be updated whenever a Hubble comparison is possible:
Well, nope, that was a deep field image. People have seen deep field images from Hubble before. They really kinda blew it with a half-baked explanation of why people should be excited for the Webb deep field vs. Hubble. I wish they'd have emphasized how Webb takes significantly less time to build sharp images because of how much larger Webb's mirror is, and then gave a shout out to all the engineering that went into the sequence of unfolding and aligning/calibrating the mirror segments. They briefly mentioned that it sees further into the infrared than Hubble, but only related it to nearby planetary atmospheric sensing. Starting 45 minutes late because of Biden "needing to prepare for a trip to the middle east" was also hilarious. Good job, everyone. Finally, here's the actual image release that they cropped and teased in the press conference: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet The gravitational lensing from the nearby galaxy cluster is neat-o, you can see more distant galaxies bending around the center of the image. I think I see the same galaxy twice! Oh shit there's an accompanying blurb below the image, sorry, I got excited, just go read that :). edit: and wtf was up with kicking the press out and taking no questions? So weird.