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comment by am_Unition

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.





kleinbl00  ·  872 days ago  ·  link  ·  

They could really put some context to these things, the way they did with Pillars of Creation.

am_Unition  ·  872 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This administration couldn't make the discovery of aliens walking among us seem exciting.

mk  ·  871 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We replaced far too exciting with far too boring.