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.
Thank you. If I was in a spaceship at a much closer distance to the object than I am right now, would I be able to see the dust and the shape similar to what we see on the photos? Or is this all invisible to the human eye?
Sure. It's a physical object, reflecting broadband light from nearby stars. The colors would be different, and you might not see the same fine structure without filters, like how the Sun looks very different through a Calcium K line filter https://thelonelyphoton.com/2022/01/08/solar-imaging/
Given its size the density is probably pretty low, though. If you got right up next to it you wouldn't see much, in the same way a fog bank gets less visible when you walk towards it.
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.
I think my point is that because the nebula is in our own galaxy, its motion relative to Earth would be dominated by the orbital motions of the two bodies (insofar as one can consider a whole nebula a "body"). So any Doppler shift of the light traveling from the nebula to Earth would be redshifted as the galactocentric orbits of the two bodies carried them away from each other, but blueshifted as the orbits carried them towards each other.
Which is a roundabout way of also saying: the nebula and Earth are in a gravitaionally bound system (the Milky Way) where gravity overpowers whatever it is that's causing cosmic inflation. So even if their orbital motions result in a redshift as currently viewed from Earth, the amount of redshift contributed by inflation (if any) is undetectable.
That said, if you know the orbits of two bodies, and can predict their motion relative to one another, you could calculate the expected red or blue shift, as viewed from one of those bodies, at any point in their orbits. :)
