JWST is undeniably a superior and remarkable instrument, but there has been a bit of a trend I have noticed on social media - and this may just be my perception rather than reality - of comparing it with suboptimal alternatives rather than the best image we had prior to the JWST, often making the new images look dramatically better when in fact the improvements to the best images we already had are more subtle (perhaps because they are particularly subtle on low res article thumbnails and mobile devices?)
I doubt it's anything nefarious. I think it's due to choosing comparisons based on popularity vs content.
Hubble's visible light Pillars of Creation image, for example, is super famous and instantly recognizable, but I'm not sure I would have known what I was looking at if the infrared version was used.
Also, different devices rarely have exactly the same usage and specifications. For example, Webb and Hubble have very different wavelength sensitivities, and this has tradeoffs in resolution and quality. In other words, the subjective image quality you get from the pictures may not tell the whole story of how valuable the data itself is.
Well some of that is because JWST's images are actually lower resolution than Hubble in many cases (depending on the wavelength). Though at wavelengths they both operate in, Webb's will of course be much higher resolution.
>Webb’s deeper infrared vision (0.6 microns to 28.5 microns)
That's true for the entire observatory, but this particular image was captured with NIRCAM, the near-infrared instrument, which goes out to 5 microns. Deep infrared is done with MIRI, a lower resolution instrument. (As required by the Abbe diffraction law)
Hubble can take images similar to what you see, but the famous pillars of creation image is not an example of that.
That in image in "Hubble pallet" or SHO. It's an image where the colors come from three extremely narrow spectral bands that have better contrast in astronomical images because they show ionized gasses with less noise from dust reflected blackblody light.
Red=sulphur line, Green=Hydrogen line Blue=oxygen line.
The oxygen line appear blue-green to the human eye, and the Hydrogen alpha line is a dim far red color that the eye isn't very sensitive to, the sulphur line is even further towards the infrared, barely visible at all.
Ignoring magnification and only considering visible light, Hubble imagery is a colorized version of what you could see if you could stare at an object for hours at a time while accumulating every photon during that time at a 0Hz refresh rate into a single image rather than just seeing new faint photons at a constant refresh rate.
Take the colorized image to B&W, and that would be closer to what the human eye could see.
If you've ever been to a dark sky location so that you could see the Milky Way, then that's about what you'd see. Our eyes just are not sensitive enough to pick out colors. Even in a telescope, viewing objects like Orion's Nebula, which is incredibly bright, it is just B&W in the eye piece. Viewing Andromeda galaxy is also just B&W.
There is no way you could see this with your own eyes, there's no vantage point you can "stand on" to see the pillars - you'd either be too far away to see anything, or if you moved close enough so your eyes could actually focus on something, you'd be "inside" it, meaning you would see one star at most.
yes, hubble's image is closer to what you could see with your eyes, since we also (mostly) sensitive to visible light. the zoom magnification is different, though, of course.
Depends on when you would see it. Because of inflation the color of things far away is shifting to longer wavelengths so they become invisible later in the timeline of the universe (invisible to humans).
The subject of this particular image is part of the Eagle Nebula in our own galaxy. So it's near enough to be gravitationally bound and not subject to the redshift of cosmic inflation.
