James Webb Space Telescope 🔭

[modest dune]

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/w5ax6r/james_webb_telescope_reveals_millions_of_galaxies/

More galaxies, earlier than understandable, indeed... 👏

[brave coral]

i dont think that there they found more galaxies earlier than understandable, right? just more disc galaxies than hubble observed

[old charm]

not yet

but keep in mind that it almost instantly found a galaxy older than the oldest Hubble had ever found

[modest dune]

I look forward to the comparison between Hubble's original deep field and when JWST gets around to it early next year

[brave coral]

id hope so!

[modest dune]

considering the redshift levels it can handle, aye

[pseudo bramble]

It's a discord post of a reddit post of a BBC News post of a scientific paper of the initial galaxy cluster lens deep field image.

The scientific paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09428

TLDR early galaxies are more spiral morphologically than expected (although just read the abstract).

[brave coral]

do you know what z > 3 means? I read the abstract and am not an astro-whatever-ist so I wasnt familair with that

i assume its the redshift

but that's just a guess

[pseudo bramble]

https://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/proj/basic/universe/redshifts.asp

First link from basic google search. It appears to be a measure of the redshift, likely based on specific hydrogen emission spectra fingerprints.

The abstract says they assessed the 3 < Z < 8 galaxies which is essentially the highly red shifted galaxies. It is pretty nice how scientific writing forces abstracts to be mostly readable.

[noble quarry]

z is redshift, yes

[brave coral]

nailed it

thanks!!

[ornate marsh]

it's the relative change in wavelength of the light, so a z of 3 means that the wavelength of light is 3x longer than the emitted wavelength

[brave coral]

woah that's a lot longer!

[pseudo bramble]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/nasas-new-toy-may-have-already-spotted-the-oldest-known-galaxy/

Identifying signals that only appear as wavelengths are increased to identify possible oldest galaxies from the JWST deep field image already released.

[brave coral]

But the distance and age are exceptional—these billions of stars formed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang. And, based on theoretical considerations, we wouldn't expect these early galaxies to be as common as they appear to be. The researchers estimate that if galaxies were visible at the rates we'd expect, they'd have had to search through an area 10 times larger to come up with them. If these numbers hold, our theoretical considerations about the formation of the first stars and galaxies will need significant revision.

That probably shouldn't surprise us; as the research team notes, we don't have strong constraints on how the earliest stars formed, which allows a lot of uncertainty here. But for now, we can't explain this; in different parts of the paper, the team writes, "It is still unclear what the physical reason for this might be," and "The physical mechanisms driving this departure are yet to be definitively established."

[modest dune]

I wonder when JWST will have results on the Hubble Tension AKA The Crisis in Cosmology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsCjRjA4O7Y

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble's_law#Hubble_tension

Ahh... KBC isn't the largest void, though it is close at 2nd place (re: potential cause/effect relationship with the local/recent hubble constant observations)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBC_Void

[old charm]

chose my own colors for the cosmic cliffs, and some slight compositing

[ornate marsh]

if the image is false color anyway, might as well use fun colors

[old charm]

exactly!

easy to break apart the RGB channels and swap them for whichever colors you want

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/07/15/senior-project-scientist-john-mather-reflects-on-journey-to-webbs-first-images/

[modest dune]

They do rotate the telescope to get the diffraction spikes away from things! https://youtu.be/NiyZfAgoRFk?t=1573

[modest dune]

If there's anyone who's not already familiar with JWST in your life, this is really good as an intro with the full story including the initial image results as payoff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF-7eKtzAHM

[safe bronze]

The uploader has not made this video available in your country

[grave carbon]

RIP

[old charm]

?

[thorn musk]

as in not available?

probably what the RIP is for

[grave carbon]

Yeah

[modest dune]

Yessss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8_KMiYu3BM

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/08/02/how-to-follow-webbs-next-steps/

[modest dune]

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/stsci-01g8jzq6gwxhex15pyy60wdrsk.png?itok=1gQYAKHT

[pseudo bramble]

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/webb-captures-stellar-gymnastics-in-the-cartwheel-galaxy

[brave coral]

what the heck thats crazy

[old charm]

Yoink

[normal portal]

it should be from the parachute

[modest dune]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGbqlFb3yg

[pseudo bramble]

Super weird seeing a mix of youtube optimized content (often called click bait), mixed with scientific paper content.

(I get why and don't mind people optimizing their videos for youtube; it's just interesting when it's applied to coverage of scientific content)

[pseudo comet]

(for those who don't get why? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng )

[old charm]

Finally got around to color grading on that one

[modest dune]

nice

[glad mist]

JWST shows Big Bang didn’t happen?
https://mindmatters.ai/2022/08/james-webb-space-telescope-shows-big-bang-didnt-happen-wait/

[modest dune]

JWST shows lamda-cdm model might need a lot of revision ||and the observations still look consistent with my musing about inflation, dark matter, and baryogenesis being solved replaced by a huge number of antimatter-as-neutrinos causing time compression in halos around galaxies, pushing inward and outward at the same time and explaining why MOND results give better correlations with the visible mass--because the halos aren't inside the galaxies dominating gravitation with a smooth bubble, but outside||

[pseudo bramble]

From a quick read of the link, the raw info appears to be the count of early galaxies is higher to some extent than expected from current models.

Gives me click bait feel otherwise with the wordings chosen.

[modest dune]

Oh I just realized that the article makes it sound like the individual galaxies are smooth rather than their distribution

It's not just that there are more of them earlier than anticipated, they're also more evenly spread out than would be expected if they had only the time since "then" until "now" (old, distant universe vs. modern, local universe), I'm pretty sure

[old charm]

to my understanding it's that there's a greater percentage of spiral galaxies out of the whole than expected, as it's thought there wasn't sufficient time for them to develop those spirals and complexity

[carmine olive]

I think the argument is that, if you measure age by redshift

then there are galexies that formed very qucikly after the big bang that by our model the unriverse was not mature enough to form such galexies

or smth idk

[old charm]

The crux of the issue then is that measuring age by redshift is making an assumption about the expansion rate of the universe, which itself hinges upon the assumption that our standard candles are correct

all of which is underpinned by the assumption that the fundamental constants of the universe have remained constant

it's a house of cards

[modest dune]

I think one of the most telling things is that we are coincidentally at the point in the timeline of the lamda-cdm model where matter (including dark) density is equal to that of dark energy.

I don't think that's a coincidence. I think it's something that would always be observed to be the case throughout the entire history of the universe if the lamda-cdm model were used (meaning the timeline is broken and makes bad projections due to misattribution of the factors observed to be equivalent in density/intensity)

If the inflation of the universe and gravitational binding of matter were opposite sides of the same thing (gravity), it would mean that the expansion of the universe and contraction of bound matter (both forms of spacetime curvature) were always in balance

[old charm]

could be

cosmology as a whole is just fraught with so much fill in the blank guesswork compared to GR and QM at least. They can be distilled down to a handful of first principles and the rest of the theory follows easily, cosmology is… decidedly not that

[modest dune]

I should note that the force carriers would have only momentum, no influence on spacetime curvature, in this

hehe yeah

I wish I had math for this stuff rather than things like "Wouldn't it be elegant if the missing antimatter were just..still out there?"

[pseudo bramble]

https://www.universetoday.com/157184/a-new-image-from-webb-shows-galaxy-ngc-1365-known-to-have-an-actively-feeding-supermassive-black-hole/

Anyone have the link to the raw image, other links for this?

https://youtu.be/qryC4KjRnbQ

[old charm]

Holy crap that one is cool

[jade valve]

cant seem to find it. i assume its not an official image or at least not made available to public yet

author of the post compilled it themselves. also iirc they make all of jwst findings/data available to public so maybe it was compiled off that?

for full resolution/size images i look here:

https://esawebb.org/images/?&sort=-release_date

seems to be the most up to date official website

i think this confirms my hunch:

https://www.reddit.com/r/jameswebb/comments/woqic5/the_jwst_snaps_a_close_up_of_the_doublebarred/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

.

[jade valve]

https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/52289366115/in/photostream/

[pseudo bramble]

Some additional JWST images in that persons set of images there.

[old charm]

I might grab the data later and toy around with it myself if I can figure it out

[jade valve]

seems about right

screenshot from a reddit post asking "where to find jwst images"

[old charm]

My workflow would be to toss it all into blender and go ham

Surely not the best tool but it’s the one I know

[jade valve]

theres also this:

https://web.wwtassets.org/specials/2022/jwst-release/

no idea what they use to render these images, would be fun to try it tho

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/08/22/webbs-jupiter-images-showcase-auroras-hazes/

[modest dune]

Well that's a gorgeous level of detail on Jupiter

[modest dune]

I didn't mean for this to be a test of circularity, but...

[old charm]

Sphericity?

[noble quarry]

so oblate!

[pseudo comet]

gas go spinny

[brave coral]

evidence of superstructures under Jupiter's thin cloud later

[jade valve]

interesting

https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblate_spheroid#:~:text=An oblate spheroid is a,this type are called ellipsoids.

[modest dune]

@manic charm

[manic charm]

oh thanks

[jade valve]

artemis 1 launching tomorrow

1233 utc

[jade valve]

https://youtu.be/CMLD0Lp0JBg

[last shadow]

3:30 am..

why does all the cool space stuff happen so early my time

[normal terrace]

#1013456118506336326 btw 🙂

[last shadow]

thanks

[jade valve]

yeah

ill barely make it. would it be a couple hours earlier i wouldnt

[noble quarry]

... and scrubbed 😦

[jade valve]

yeah...

[last shadow]

all these don't work for me, Im setting up wallapers and would like to use them as wallpapers is there another website? ( asking anyone, no ping )

[carmine olive]

You might have to downscale lol

they're really really high res

[last shadow]

no literally doesn't work

huh, disabling adblock does this

[carmine olive]

oh maybe it's a dead link

lmfao

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-first-ever-direct-image-of-distant-world/

[noble quarry]

it's too bad that the article never mentioned the distance to the planet: ~385 ly

[last shadow]

I need that! Did you buy it or make it?

[carmine olive]

I made it! cost me about 15 bucks

https://www.amazon.com/Stickers-LYGZTing-Removable-Acrylic-Hexagon/dp/B09722MG6S/

10 actually

[pseudo comet]

I don't want to rain on your parade, but some of those mirrors look slightly misaligned

[carmine olive]

unlike nasa, they are affixed to the wall via loops of tape

and not sub-10nm accuracy like the nasa adjusters

if you have any better ideas I've love to hear

[pseudo comet]

accept my observation for the lighthearted tease it was meant to be

[carmine olive]

hehe

it breaks up the image so it might actually be slightly better for room design reasons

to have them slightly disaligned

current better idea is to cnc either wood (and paint/stain it black) or lexan and have them slot perfectly in

[pseudo comet]

there's definitely a tradeoff to be considered. what you have is a really cool fixture, even disregarding the low cost you put into it

[carmine olive]

100%. The only thing I'm worried about rn is them falling off because they're on with tape loops

[pseudo comet]

even just a standard 'adhesive gum' may be an improvement?

[carmine olive]

Potentially

it is not my walls so I can't really fuck up the paint

but whatever

[brave coral]

woah! i want it

[carmine olive]

It's pretty cheap!
I'm unsure how to not fuck up walls tho lol

I made this slick jig

help me fit them perfectly

it needed to be a decent bit longer but I could correct for slop manually

[noble quarry]

tape loops are surprisingly robust for low-mass stuff; blue (painting) tape is the way to go to give the lowest chance of wall damage after a few years (for tape, at least)

[noble quarry]

if you want to be very silly, print up a small poster of a Webb image and put it on the wall directly across from the array 😛

[carmine olive]

I love that idea

[pseudo bramble]

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/a-cosmic-tarantula-caught-by-nasa-s-webb

[wispy sun]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-first-ever-direct-image-of-distant-world/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/13/webbs-scientific-method-what-to-expect/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/19/mars-is-mighty-in-first-webb-observations-of-red-planet/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/20/mid-infrared-instrument-operations-update/

[pseudo bramble]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/webb-telescope-captures-dazzling-views-of-neptune-and-its-moons/

[bold bronze]

holy shit its beautiful

[noble quarry]

ring ring ring ring bananaphone Neptune

[old charm]

It’s neat to see the rings, but I’m whelmed by the planet itself

[safe bronze]

Same, lol. Scientists are probably having a field day with the data though :P

[brave coral]

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-dart-mission-hits-asteroid-in-first-ever-planetary-defense-test/

🆒

also google 'nasa DART' for an easter egg

[noble quarry]

a good asteroid redirection is when you move the asteroid; a great one is when you also get to reuse the spacecraft 😛

[wispy sun]

fun backronyms are my favorite thing in science

[stray kindle]

Last night was pretty cool, got to see Jupyter and then got back home right at the time to see the intentional crashing stream. Also there was something immensely funny for me how there were a bunch of people celebrating 'lost signal'

[old charm]

Found the programmer

[stray kindle]

Damn, you got me, though not sure what exactly gave me away

[old charm]

Jupyter

The planet is Jupiter

[stray kindle]

Ah, thought the short i there is only in my native tongue

[wispy sun]

They hit a 525 foot rock 6.8 million miles away at 14000 mph

[noble quarry]

barely 0.5 km/s

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/10/03/nasa-webb-image-coming-this-week/

[brave coral]

NASA will share a new image or spectrum from the James Webb Space Telescope at least every other week on the mission’s blog. This week, check the blog on Wednesday, Oct. 5 at 10 a.m. EDT for a new image highlighting a galaxy pair.

so you dont have to read it

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/10/05/webb-hubble-team-up-to-trace-interstellar-dust-within-a-galactic-pair/

[safe bronze]

https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GE08RNPH8RBMMGMC52JD3R93.png

[old charm]

whelp, apparently blender can't handle the Tarantula Nebula photo at full resolution

it gives up

[brave coral]

woah!

[brave coral]

wohaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat

oh did you color edit htat?

[last shadow]

Nice addition to my background collection!

[old charm]

yes!

I'm still fiddling with this one 🤔

[old charm]

better

[manic charm]

or your pc doesn't want to melt

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/10/10/nasa-webb-image-coming-this-week-2/

[pseudo bramble]

I guess that image above is like sunlight shining on a window showing how dusty it is. Fascinating

[old charm]

Kinda yeah

or sunbeams through a window showing how dusty it is inside the building

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/10/12/webb-reveals-shells-of-dust-surrounding-brilliant-binary-star-system/

[modest dune]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/wp-content/uploads/sites/326/2022/10/STScI-01GEPRP510NX3PVHK418HX188K-1536x1060.png

[brave coral]

woah

the article is well worth reading

its not some sort of visual glitch causing the rings. the rings are shells of dust created periodically when the binary stars in the center of the image get their closest every 8 years.

[noble quarry]

starshells!

[brave coral]

alternative explanation: dyson shells

[brave coral]

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-takes-star-filled-portrait-of-pillars-of-creation

love this one!!!

and finally, my prediction has come (semi) true!

eagle nebula wasnt the first one, but we got it in the first 6 months! and it looks sooooo good!!!

im so happy!!!

[modest dune]

the video from the page is worth a look too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1__KBHIo_xs

[bold bronze]

So incredible

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/10/24/nasa-webb-image-coming-this-week-3/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/10/26/webb-offers-never-before-seen-details-of-early-universe/

[modest dune]

splitting distant red dots into a pair of clouds has never been so exciting

[safe bronze]

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/yhaepq/270000_stars_counted_and_separated_from_the_jwsts/

[old charm]

That’s whelming

They missed some diffraction artifacts

[safe bronze]

They missed some stars too :P

[brave coral]

worse, there's this thing where the 4 bright stars in the right middle used to be

i think it looks cool tho

oh interesting, they did it with an AI

i guess that explains the inconsistent results. still very cool!

[brave coral]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/world/asia/china-launch-space-station.html

lets go

https://archive.ph/2bXGR

anti-paywall

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/11/07/nasa-webb-image-coming-this-week-4/

[modest dune]

I assume they create posts for the actual images too right?

maybe yay could filter out the later-this-week posts? :P

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/11/08/webbs-mid-infrared-instrument-returns-to-full-functionality/

[brave coral]

interesting

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/11/09/beneath-the-night-sky-in-a-galaxy-not-too-far-away/

[modest dune]

anyone else notice that file name? 😂 https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/wp-content/uploads/sites/326/2022/11/MicrosoftTeams-image-28.png

The comparison of clarity and focus really is incredible, but the filename brings it slamming back to earth, immersion-wise :P

[safe bronze]

lol

[quaint plaza]

all the scientists will do is zoom the latter to look like the former and then ask for money to build a better one

[modest dune]

there's a limit to how far telescopes can even see due to redshift and the age/expansion of the universe though

JWST made a huge difference to how much of that coverage we have

[carmine olive]

we only get so many photons from each star

[safe bronze]

We need a bigger telescope though. Who knows what these tiny blue dots might be

[modest dune]

they haven't even gotten to the deep field stuff yet though

as in the long-exposure plans with jwst are still pending

[quaint plaza]

just a couple more zoom levels and we might get the :

[pseudo bramble]

Can't the telescope used to detect a given "initial wavelength" of light just steadily shift to higher wavelengths due to red shift? Visible light from stars red shifted into infrared which is within JWST range.

[modest dune]

shifting how?

[pseudo bramble]

Idk maybe I'm just curious what you meant. Like just a re-word from you.

[noble quarry]

one problem is, under current inflation theory, at some point early on, the universe expansion rate exceeded the speed of light, so it's unclear that we'd be able to see much from that epoch

[modest dune]

cosmological distances are often measured in terms of redshift (a z-value)

so yes the further away something is the more redshifted it is and the lower frequency range the instruments have to be to detect it

JWST has multiple sensors for different ranges

both in frequency and distance :P

[pseudo bramble]

Ah, gotcha gotcha. I was just over reading into what you said it seems.

My thought was that there isn't a limit to the ability of telescopes to detect red shifted light in aggregate because humans have telescopes that detect light within the different wavelength ranges. Within a specific telescope (ala Hubble) there definitely is limitations.

Presumably those heavy red shifted stars can also be detected by radio telescopes, etc. I assume there are other reasons like intensity of light at given wavelengths that makes IR especially useful for their imaging.

I read the recent JWST post just now so randomly musing.

[modest dune]

I'm not sure exactly if or how the CMB sets a noise floor for redshifted observations, come to think of it 🤔

[pseudo bramble]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/09/26/ultra-deep-radio-telescope-catches-what-hubble-cant/?sh=2670d35a1b56 Very quick google and skim seems to have similar deep field images taken with radio telescopes. Makes sense.

Presumably it's just JWST and Hubble are especially good space based telescopes making their results particularly useful.

[modest dune]

You do have a point here, I just wanted to emphasize that the diminishing returns would be high since JWST wasn't just about being bigger but also covering an entirely different frequency with sensors :P

[brave coral]

the images in that article are images from ALMA superimposed on the Hubble deep field. ALMA is a radio array and is a a different type of telescope than Hubble and James Web and doesnt take the same type of pictures

[pseudo bramble]

I guess black body emission (presumably this is a lot of the light emitted from stars) approximately matches this type of graph. So I assume the visible wavelengths have some of the highest luminance making them especially good for detection of stars. Possibly one reason JWST/Hubble are especially good at deep field images.

[brave coral]

earth based telescopes are often much larger than Webb because you dont need to launch them into space. the Gran Telescopio Canarias is possibly the largest optical telescope on earth and it has a 10m mirror. Radio arrays argubly have much much larger "mirror" sizes, but they work different. Webb "only" has a 6.5m mirror. However, Web is able to get better data because it doesnt have to shoot though the atmosphere.

[modest dune]

especially since the atmosphere blocks the infrared ranges it's observing

[brave coral]

as the wavelength of light you want to capture increases, the size of the aperture you need increases linerally. you need larger telescopes to photograph stuff with higher redshift

[pseudo bramble]

Is the black body radiation chart actually the close representation of intensity of light vs frequency of light emitted from a star? I assume this is astronomy 101 type stuff, but I didn't take that course.

Black body radiation primarily with hydrogen (other gas) emission, absorption lines overlaid on it.

[brave coral]

pretty close

its fun to note that the it peaks around visible light. coincidence?

[pseudo bramble]

If yes, then the combination of the following makes Hubble, JWST good:

1. space telescopes are especially good at high signal to noise ratio which is good for long exposures (ala deep field)
2. limitations of rocket launches prevent high quality space based radio, microwave telescopes
3. visible, IR light has especially high luminance making it good for detecting stars

[pseudo bramble]

Presumably you're saying eyes evolved to detect the highest intensity light source?

[brave coral]

no clue

[pseudo bramble]

Ah, idk what you meant by that then.

[brave coral]

but seems plausable

[modest dune]

not just luminance but also angular resolution

[brave coral]

i just thought it was fun to note, and wondered if it was a coincidence

[modest dune]

it takes way more collection area to resolve the source of a radio wave

[pseudo bramble]

Yep yep. The whole angular resolution based on size of the telescope. I gotcha. (insert all that other technical stuff I read about for JWST when it was especially in the news)

[brave coral]

also, if you look at the packaging for a light bulb, they have a marked temperature. the "temperature" of light bulbs is the same as the temperature of a blackbody that emits a similar spectrum

specifically, incandescent light bulbs were pretty much just really hot black bodies

[noble quarry]

stars are pretty good blackbodies, in general (neglecting absorption lines, of course)

(in space, of course; once you go through an atmosphere, it gets messy)

[thorn musk]

neglecting absorption lines is kind-of cheating though

[pseudo bramble]

The solar radiation spectrum was already posted above which answered the question. Direct data good.

[old charm]

You have to specify a distance scale with “faster than the speed of light” or the statement is meaningless

Since it’s space expanding and it compounds, you can always get to “faster than the speed of light” just by going out farther (assuming it’s within your light cone to be observed)

[old charm]

@pseudo bramble No, not a coincidence. Why would you evolve to see light that doesn’t exist to be seen, or doesn’t provide useful information? At most such a mutation would drift but not have any adaptive benefit so it wouldn’t be likely to spread

Also important here is that chemical compounds with conjugated systems (like the pigments in eyes) tend to fluoresce/absorb light in the UV/visible range

[brave coral]

well, if the star primary emitted radio waves, I wonder if they would be useful for vision because of their large wavelength. it might be that eyes would evolve to see lower wavelength light even if the star's primary wavelength was too long to be useful

[thorn musk]

if anything having light cones for light that isnt there is a negative trait

having them isnt free

[old charm]

Maybe, maybe not, depends on how much energy it is to retain. Light cone does not mean photoreceptor

[thorn musk]

any kind of receptor takes energy simply to build out of proteins

so either its in place of another, better-suited one or youve added a cost

[brave coral]

also, if eyes evolved underwater, the absorption of water might heavily affect the evolution of the eye

or, if eyes evolved to be filled with water

[old charm]

Note that the pigment molecule size scales roughly with the wavelength of light it absorbs (true of any given confined system)

[brave coral]

water is mostly only penetrated by wavelengths close to visible light

so perhaps it is water rather than the sun that caused visible light to be what's picked up by eyes

[old charm]

Both

[brave coral]

exactly!

[old charm]

Got a graph title for this?

[brave coral]

so, if we lived in a star that "mostly" emitted radio waves, we might be seeing visible light anyways just because of water

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_water

[old charm]

Is it water absorption or the combination of water absorption and insolation

Because the latter is what we really care about, not just what water absorbs alone

[brave coral]

Liquid water absorption spectrum across a wide wavelength range
is the caption

[old charm]

So it’s the former

[brave coral]

do you have one of the latter?

[old charm]

Nope

It’s also complicated since the units don’t quite like up

[brave coral]

all im saying is, im not convinced its not a coincidence

[old charm]

Note that the water one means that the color (relative strength of wavelengths) of perceived light changes with depth

Absorption is -per meter

[old charm]

What evidence would you have to see to confirm it isn’t a coincidence?

[thorn musk]

if water is required for life one could infer that any aliens that exist likely see similar colours to us :P

simply because of what water does or doesnt block

[old charm]

But if your star is red, then is there much point in seeing blue or even yellow light, even if water lets it through?

[brave coral]

i would say that the burden of proof is on the one trying to establish causality

i think ive established two alternate explanations and its not clear why we should favor any of the three without evidence

[old charm]

That wasn’t the question I asked though

[thorn musk]

a "red" star would still emit some green and blue, so the question is if that is more than the mostly-blocked alternatives

[brave coral]

the star is "mostly" red. like how the sun is "mostly" yellow, we still see other colors.

the question i have (i have no answer) is: is it necessarily the case that animals living around the a star will always perceive peak wavelength color the star emits? or are some wavelengths (visible(?)) somehow more useful than others and are more likely to be perceived regardless of the star?

[noble quarry]

you mean, will animals have the peak of their visual sensitivity near the blackbody peak of the star?

looks like O and B type stars have their spectral peaks in the UV, but they'll still emit quite a bit in visible wavelengths

[old charm]

So there's two separate questions of "can perceive" and "peak of visual perception"

[pseudo comet]

see: deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems?

[jade valve]

no, its not a coincidence

i think its a mix of reasons

1. the majority of the radiation put out by the sun is in the visible spectrum
2. humans evolved the ability to detect the wavelengths of light that are the most informative for helping us survive and reproduce in our particular environment
3. its high enough energy to not be drowned out by thermal radiation which is the case for infrared, and its largely transparent to small molecules so it penetrates air and water but not solid objects. and theres not much evolutionary advantage to seeing radio waves or xrays

im sure there are other reasons and more scientific explanations. but basically

visible light = useful for humans

[pseudo bramble]

Majority likely not the right word.

2. Very reasonable and the most direct mechanism for why evolution would select for a given sensor.

I wonder how much variance in absolute quality of human made sensors exits due to tech advances for visible light cameras. Probably isn’t that big a contribution to Webb Hubble having good sensors.

[safe bronze]

Species evolving on a planet with an atmosphere that is not transparent to visible light would very likely see in different wavelengths - if at all

[pseudo bramble]

Like is Webb so good because we’ve spent so much drooping the detector advances.

[jade valve]

i think someone asked for this but theres a limit to how far the telescopes can see into the space

the oldest light

we actually reached that a while ago

the cosmic microwave background

when the universe was around 379k years old. thats when the first atoms formed. before that it was all plasma

and its physically impossible to see before that

the most distant (confirmed) astronomical object (forming galaxy) that we have captured is gn-z11 and the light is around 13,4 billion years old. around 400 million years after the big bang

by hubble

patiently waiting for what jwst finds

[safe bronze]

The resolution definitely needs some work though

[jade valve]

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2013/03/Planck_CMB

[jade valve]

just a pic i pulled off google

[safe bronze]

As I say, the resolution needs some work

[jade valve]

i can highly recommend this channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SEAmedia

has videos where he goes into great detail about jwst, cmb, lambda-cdm model, early universe, andromeda (the reason we discovered that the universe is much bigger than milky way), dark matter, dark energy, etc etc

and his videos are actually watchable

hes working on a video about ''journey to the edge of the universe''

that should be interesting

[safe bronze]

It better not be another powers of 10 clone

[jade valve]

i doubt

i think its full time for him and he outputs a video every 1-2 months

[pseudo bramble]

@jade valve You did see the JWST inital set of image releases and subsequent papers that already have found a/several galaxies older than the one you linked right?

[jade valve]

yeah but those are candidates. gn-z11 is confirmed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJQjjBR6PbY&ab_channel=JeffersonLab

one of my favorites

we are star stuff

[quaint plaza]

If I understand it correctly the move to infrared means that it can observe things that have a greater red shift and so look further back in time/distance. If that's the case I wonder why so much effort is spent on producing false colour images of objects when, presumably, you could identify the signature of a known "thing" and then shift the frequencies up the scale to reverse the effect of red-shift and get back the original true colours

¯_(ツ)_/¯

maybe that is already done

[safe bronze]

True colors are boring, it's just all various shades of white :P

[pseudo comet]

FFT (||fast fourier transform||) has entered the chat?

[brave coral]

that's not strictly true. there's colors

[pseudo comet]

consider each frequency as pure-alpha

[safe bronze]

And I may not be strictly serious:P

[brave coral]

oh ok

[old charm]

That already happens yes

Everything JWST sees is some degree of red, anything beyond that is false color, and chances are the “red” in the image you can’t even actually see

NIRCam just barely squeaks into the green range

[quaint plaza]

I was just thinking of de-red-shifting the image by the amount it's shifted... like, if you can find something you know should be at 5300K then you can shift your frequency data up so that the received frequency gets corrected

[carmine olive]

this only works when we're looking at visible light that's been redshifted into the jst range

[quaint plaza]

yea, that's what I meant, but I getcha, sometimes ... maybe most of the time they are shifting the invisible visible

[carmine olive]

yea I think so

[modest dune]

The purpose is to make the contrasts appreciable at anu rate; even if the colors are shifted "accurately" it still has exposure and aperture differences changing the intensity so we can see it

[quaint plaza]

gotcha

[noble quarry]

this is why we need gravitational wave telescopes 🙂

[brave coral]

the CMB blows my mind and I cant really wrap my head around it

[modest dune]

why's that?

[brave coral]

i think the fact that the universe was so tiny back then but yet the CMB is in every direction

[modest dune]

it wasn't tiny at the re-ionization, that was well after inflation (assuming the inflationary model)

[brave coral]

like, its bigger than it was? if that makes sense

even though its not really any size anymore because its in the past

[modest dune]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSJtzn2H3Do

Very much related^

[brave coral]

like, okay. assume the CMB wasnt there. then every point in the universe would terminate on the first nanosecond after the universe was created, which would just be like a point

this video seems very relevant to this yes

[modest dune]

hehe

[brave coral]

and hey! the title is wrong because I'm talking about it

[modest dune]

I only learned about it recently

[brave coral]

yeah so the CMB is HUGE in that its literally on every point in the universe but its also very tiny

i cant realllly wrap my head around that

[modest dune]

try imagining spacetime inside out such that every possible destination of a photon emitted from a spot on a star is in some sense adjacent in terms of the quantum entanglement of outcomes

[old charm]

Assumption being that the Big Bang is true of course

[brave coral]

its like that black hole thing where once you get close enough to the black hole (but before you get inside it) you see it inverted all around you

[modest dune]

I don't doubt the big bang, but inflation as distinct from dark energy. . . :P

[brave coral]

IC, i feel like you shared a video about that with me? or maybe me with you?

it was like flying around in 3D with a black hole whose surface was painted to look like earth's surface

[pseudo comet]

tangential?
https://xkcd.com/2622/

xkcd: Angular Diameter Turnaround

Thank you to Katie Mack for teaching me about this effect, and to Janelle Shane for describing redshifts as 'like galaxies sinking into a pool of dilute blood,' which is how I'll see them from now on.

[modest dune]

O_O

Okay I officially need to catch up on xkcd. hah

[brave coral]

very similar idea yes!

[modest dune]

I don't remember that specifically. hrm

[brave coral]

maybe it wasnt you hehe i jsut feel like its something youd share

i cant find it darn

[brave coral]

a few questions about this:

• shouldnt the 13 billion years thing be redshifted too? or no?
• why is it that the 13 million year thing is covering up something 9 billion years? shouldnt the 9 billion year thing be closer?

[pseudo comet]

13B years ago after is "kind of just happened" for illustrative purposes 🤷

[brave coral]

oh doh, I read them all as "13 billion years ago," but they actually say "13 billion years after the big bang"

[pseudo comet]

"ago" and "after big bang" have an inverse relationship, yeah

[brave coral]

yes

[old charm]

Quite a lot of the current cosmological model relies on having a ton of assumptions and parameters trying to answer questions that are more philosophical than physical ones

[brave coral]

what questions?

[old charm]

Things like “why is the universe so smooth at large scales?” -> inventing inflation to explain it, instead of accepting that it could’ve just been that way

There’s a few others but I’d have to think on it when I have more time

and now inflation is more or less just accepted as fact while we don’t really have… that much in the way of evidence for it

[brave coral]

oh okay i see what you mean but i mean you need some assumptions to go off of unless you have a time machine

[old charm]

It’s just a convenient thing to make things nice and pretty and easy for human minds when there’s no indication that’s actually how things are. Most models are similar in that they’re generally created to explain behavior that’s observed, not to answer a question that’s based more on feeling than observation

[old charm]

So assuming inflation gets us… where exactly?

[pseudo comet]

post hoc ergo propter hoc?

[old charm]

It explains a couple of things, but those things might not even need explaining

[last shadow]

can you define inflation?

[old charm]

Not quite

[modest dune]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch

[old charm]

The specific theorized era in the early universe (<1 second) that the universe is thought to have rapidly and exponentially (in the mathematical sense) grown in size

[brave coral]

it gets a theory that predicts situations we havent encountered yet

[old charm]

Not the general concept of the universe expanding

[old charm]

No, it’s a theory that explains situations we are assuming to exist

[brave coral]

no, it produces a theory that fits all known data so far and predicts unobserved historical data, and future data

if you had another theory that fit all data so far without inflation you could compare it to a theory with inflation. you could ask yourself why you'd prefer one over the other

[pseudo comet]

'unobserved historical data'
now there's an intriguing noun-phrase!

[modest dune]

inflation as it stands creates discontinuities and weirdness with no explanation for the phase change into and out of the inflationary effect other than the conditions needed to massage the numbers for the assumed conditions

[old charm]

This paragraph epitomizes my issue with it:

The rapid expansion of space meant that any potential elementary particles (or other unwanted artifacts, such as topological defects) remaining from time before inflation were now distributed very thinly across the universe.

[brave coral]

typically the answer is something like "well this theory implies some things that feel fundamentally less likely than this other theory," like "the universe is not homogeneous"

[old charm]

There’s a huge built in assumption there that “potential elementary particles or unwanted artifacts” existed and needed to be distributed

And the whole model is a house of cards like that

[modest dune]

what I really want to know is how neutrinos separating out were factored in and if it's possible that we've overlooked that because of the difficulty (impossibility?) of detecting those now-low-energy relic neutrinos with current technology

[brave coral]

you cant just remove inflation and have a model that's consistent with observed data, you need to insert new assumptions

you can pick which assumptions seem most likely to you, but ultimately those assumptions can be proved wrong with new data

so the answeerto the question of "what does assuming inflation gets us?" is "a consistent theory"

[old charm]

then you start running into Occam’s Razor. If you have to event a process or phenomenon to explain something but are making the same number of assumptions, your process isn’t really doing much explaining

[last shadow]

Eventually with enough assumptions, you can rule out something. Reminds me of sodoku

[old charm]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology) better article

More information about the theory itself and what it’s trying to explain

[pseudo comet]

"physics is just math constrained by precepts of reality"

[brave coral]

when picking which consistent theory you like most, one technique is to use the razor, yeh. its like considering theories that assume gravity and theories that dont. both might be entirely consistent with observed data. which is simpler? well, maybe to you, gravity is insane and the other theory makes more intuitive sense. that's awesome! if they both make sense to you, and both have the same amount of experimental support, then that's great.

[old charm]

Inflation resolves several problems in Big Bang cosmology that were discovered in the 1970s.[26] Inflation was first proposed by Alan Guth in 1979 while investigating the problem of why no magnetic monopoles are seen today; he found that a positive-energy false vacuum would, according to general relativity, generate an exponential expansion of space. It was very quickly realised that such an expansion would resolve many other long-standing problems. These problems arise from the observation that to look like it does today, the Universe would have to have started from very finely tuned, or "special" initial conditions at the Big Bang. Inflation attempts to resolve these problems by providing a dynamical mechanism that drives the Universe to this special state, thus making a universe like ours much more likely in the context of the Big Bang theory.

It’s the anthropological principle again

[brave coral]

but keep in mind that producing data that is inconsistent with inflation would produce you a nobel prize and world fame. its the experimentalist's holy grail.

[old charm]

But if you can’t conceivably falsify it then it’s also not a great model

[modest dune]

Can we pleaaaase get enough photons in one place to see if it creates a black hole or a miniature big bang with net-zero gravitation? (:

[brave coral]

yes
turns on my light switch

just a few more :)

[brave coral]

you can conceivably falsify it, its just kind of hard to get the data. there exists a model that is true. its either

• inflationary
• not inflationary
• something not yet invested
  when you are making predictions about things that you dont have hard observational data for right now, you need to pick a model. if you dont have any model, then you dont have a consistent view on how the universe works

[modest dune]

lol Kwirky

[brave coral]

if you wanted to say "i think inflation is BS" then I'm okay with that, you just need to be aware you are either

• abandoning having a model at all, which is bad
• accepting another model with its own set of assumptions (which you might not actually agree with!)

[modest dune]

I don't think it's wrong (bad) to say "The established models have too many flaws to accept any of them" without having a replacement worked out

at least with something this far removed from direct experience

[pseudo comet]

"Phlogiston theory doesn't explain all the observed nature of fire, so I guess we can conclude that fire is unknowable and unexplainable"

[modest dune]

"so I guess we have some unknowns to solve for"

[brave coral]

i think its different than that. it would be "phlogiston theory explains all of the observed nature of fire but I dont like it for aesthetic and philosophical reasons"

[pseudo comet]

another even less historically-congruent scenario: "both pholgiston and combustion/oxidation explain all observed phenomena regarding fire but operate via fundamentally different mechanisms"?

…or is my allegorical bent counterproductive?

[modest dune]

the metaphor breaks down because we can so easily test the I/O of the phenomenon of fire

[brave coral]

i think thats close

[pseudo comet]

actual history and empirical results notwithstanding, yeah

[brave coral]

or like when there was the dueling theories of light, aether and special relativity

[pseudo comet]

wait, there's an XKCD on this, too…

feh, probably buried in the what-ifs…
<image is projected high into the night-sky clouds>
"The Dark Matter signal! Someone needs our help!"
"That's one interpretation! I also have a dozen other interpretations that are consistent with all observations!"

[modest dune]

https://xkcd.com/2186/

xkcd: Dark Matter

To detect dark matter, we just need to build a bird feeder that spins two squirrels around the rim in opposite directions at relativistic speeds and collides them together.

😂 https://xkcd.com/2035/

xkcd: Dark Matter Candidates

My theory is that dark matter is actually just a thin patina of grime covering the whole universe, and we don't notice it because we haven't thoroughly cleaned the place in eons.

[pseudo comet]

I found it
https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/140/help.png (from https://what-if.xkcd.com/140/)

[old charm]

I think a better analogy would be paleontology and archaeology. Tons of things are assumed about things that we find, but we don’t really have any way to prove any of it without explicitly recorded information (which isn’t even entirely reliable). There’s occasionally a testable prediction that comes up now and then, but the vast majority of it isn’t and can’t be tested. It’s easy to come up with simple explanations for things, but when we try to apply the same simple methods to things we have in the modern day, you get stuff like this for a baboon

Cosmology is just the paleontology of the universe at large

[noble quarry]

as an experimentalist, my view is that the theorists have been allowed to run amok on far too little data for far too long, and it's high time we got some new data to start constraining/ruling out various hypothesis. which is of course why Webb is so exciting: real data!

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/11/15/nasa-webb-micrometeoroid-mitigation-update/

[modest dune]

how on earth can they tell which direction most of the rocks are coming from and orient accordingly?

that's crazy

[pseudo comet]

maybe it will be described in the "Cycle 2" report mentioned at the bottom of the article?

[noble quarry]

well, first of all, it isn't on earth ... 😛

[modest dune]

called it.. silently, but..called it

[wispy sun]

however, even after this event our current optical performance is still twice as good as our requirements.

NASA being conservative as always :p

[modest dune]

yeah haha

Rovers "planned" for weeks, lasting years

[noble quarry]

this is NASA at its best

[modest dune]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3jXhmr_o9A

[pseudo comet]

different cultures, to be sure

[modest dune]

and consequences to the network for the "benefit" of the individual (and the people watching and cheering the miracles :P)

[pseudo comet]

of course, we were shown that the Enterprise ("no bloody A, B, C, or D") made it work… so arguably things worked out way better than it could have? yay, fiction!

[brave coral]

interesting backwards apostrophe

[brave coral]

This quote describes it

Micrometeoroids that strike the mirror head on have twice the relative velocity and four times the kinetic energy, so avoiding this direction when feasible will help extend the exquisite optical performance for decades
The direction they are avoiding is "forwards"

[brave coral]

I think the key wording here is "current," given that the performance will continue to degrade

[modest dune]

But forwards around the sun, the lagrange circling path, or the combination (if the second is even significant)?

[brave coral]

I think -- guessing here -- that it would be the combination!

[old charm]

Presumably pointing backwards along the orbit around the sun (not around L5)

[autumn sierra]

They were proved mathematically long ago, but they're not stable (as the physicist put it). Guess it was named a Kugelblitz.

There's a book, "Geons, Black Holes, and the Quantum Foam" which was a good read from what i remember

[autumn sierra]

I told it to reply... ^

[modest dune]

Why would it be unstable if it existed? It's not like light is capable of escaping from the singularity, it's just a question of whether photons bend spacetime as theorized or if they might respond to but not affect spacetime curvature

[old charm]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY
tangentially related, but have you seen this yet?

[modest dune]

a while ago but yeah

[brave coral]

I wanna guess how it works! you craft a black hole of appropriate size and send it towards the target. black holes decay faster the smaller they are. at first the black hole decays slowly, but you time it so the the black hole reaches the target at a point where the hawking radiation from the decay is enough to kill everyone.

conveniently, the black hole decays completely quickly afterwards, meaning you can send your occupying force to arrive quickly after the black hole bomb does its job.

[modest dune]

want a hint? ||It's about the rotation||

[brave coral]

no! it works completely differently! (than I guessed)

[modest dune]

was that from looking at the video or the hint? :P

[brave coral]

the video

[modest dune]

aw I was hoping you'd get a chance to take another guess with the hint

[brave coral]

but only enough to know thats its not what i suggested

and involves mirrors

[modest dune]

speaking of ||rotation|| it was really cool to learn that stars ||slow their rotation as they emit stellar wind!|| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5EHbLJ_eVY

[old charm]

magnetic fields can be the source of a ton of friction

something something Mach Principle

[noble quarry]

don't forget magnetic reconnection

[old charm]

Friction has to generate heat somehow :p

[noble quarry]

indeed, the solar corona problem says hi!

[quaint plaza]

https://youtu.be/eW38rqLZMPg

[wispy sun]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/12/01/webb-keck-telescopes-team-up-to-track-clouds-on-saturns-moon-titan/

[red sail]

James Webb Space Telescope 🔭

[wispy sun]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/12/09/nasas-webb-reaches-new-milestone-in-quest-for-distant-galaxies/

[bold bronze]

Something I didn't know about until today, is that the orion capsule is "hogging" almost all of the deep space network's bandwidth, which means that JWST and other crafts are unable to operate at maximum capacity due to internal storages filling up and not enough bandwidth to send off data

[modest dune]

D:

pitchforks.gif

[bold bronze]

Which is why NASA have been testing out laser communication

They are set to mount a laser module on the ISS to act as an intermediate between future deep space commuication systems using laser and the laser points on earth, in 2023

[noble quarry]

looks like we need bandwidth limits for comms in KSP2 😛

[modest dune]

"More cameras!"
"Too many cameras!"

[pseudo bramble]

Webb data of the Hubble ultra deep field location, good stuff.

[brave coral]

where?

[pseudo bramble]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/12/09/nasas-webb-reaches-new-milestone-in-quest-for-distant-galaxies/

(posted earlier today just above)

[modest dune]

new banner get

[safe bronze]

Hehe

[wispy sun]

guess who's back

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/12/09/nasas-webb-reaches-new-milestone-in-quest-for-distant-galaxies/
2. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/12/01/webb-keck-telescopes-team-up-to-track-clouds-on-saturns-moon-titan/
3. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/11/28/nasa-webb-image-coming-this-week-5/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/12/14/webb-glimpses-field-of-extragalactic-pearls-studded-with-galactic-diamonds/

[old charm]

I like how you can kinda see the “galaxies slowly fading into a pool of blood” thing

[carmine olive]

that's crazy

[modest dune]

“This unique field is designed to be observable with Webb 365 days per year, so its time-domain legacy, area covered, and depth reached can only get better with time,” concluded Rogier.
nice

[brave coral]

a year long exposure 👀

[modest dune]

if we had another copy of the telescope. . .

[brave coral]

reaches for the blueprint tool

[noble quarry]

opens VAB menu, selects "JWST_final_mk4_final0"

[modest dune]

somehow I hadn't encountered this concept before, but it's a pretty good introduction and mentions the JWST looking for them so I'm putting it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeWyp2vXxqA

[safe bronze]

lol

I first encountered the concept very recently while reading up on supermassive black holes, lol

[thorn musk]

misread 6 hours ago as 6 years ago, "JWST was known about that long ago?"

[brave coral]

yes lol

6 years ago, it was supposed to be launched in 2018

JWST has very much been known about and planned and anticipated for a very long time

its went thru design review 14 year ago

NASA, ESA and CSA have collaborated on the telescope since 1996

[noble quarry]

Hubble (1996): "Oh yay, they're going to build me a friend!"
Hubble (2006): "Soon, my friend will be here soon!"
Hubble (2016): "Any year now ..."
Hubble (2021):

[wispy sun]

Hubble's an old man creaking along

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/12/21/james-webb-space-telescope-operations-update/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/04/21/mid-infrared-instrument-operations-update-2/
2. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/04/12/webb-shows-areas-of-new-star-formation-and-galactic-evolution/
3. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/03/24/how-webbs-coronagraphs-reveal-exoplanets-in-the-infrared/
4. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/02/22/webb-observes-a-globular-cluster-sparkling-with-separate-stars/
5. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/02/08/breaking-the-tracking-speed-limit-with-webb/
6. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/01/31/webbs-niriss-returns-to-full-operations/
7. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/01/25/webb-spies-chariklo-ring-system-with-high-precision-technique/
8. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/01/24/near-infrared-imager-and-slitless-spectrograph-operations-update/

[last shadow]

your bot has awoken @wispy sun

[wispy sun]

yeh

I turned on the "server" for the first time in like... four months?

it's an old Chromebook(Acer CB3-532) running a slightly broken GalliumOS

about 15% of the right side of the internal display is actually usable :p

[last shadow]

so its on life support

[wispy sun]

yep

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/05/12/the-telescope-allocation-committee-selecting-what-webb-observes-next/

[bold bronze]

Together, the submitted proposals requested more than 35,000 hours of telescope time, far exceeding the 5,000 hours of telescope time available to be allocated.

[wispy sun]

we need 7 JWSTs, clearly 🙂

[pseudo comet]

Rule Number One of Government Spending: Why build one, when you can build two for only twice the price?

[brave coral]

could you imagine if there were 7 JWSTs?

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/06/30/saturns-rings-shine-in-webbs-observations-of-ringed-planet/

[brave coral]

anyone know how to see the other images taken during this program?

[pseudo bramble]

https://webb.nasa.gov I believe this page has links to the released images.

Hamburger menu -> Webb Flickr albums.

[brave coral]

i can only find the one from the article there

[pseudo bramble]

Top right menu has links when I click it. “Web images and launches” -> Flickr

[brave coral]

right, I can only find the one fron the article on the flickr but more are alluded to

its also the only image here https://webbtelescope.org/images

[pseudo bramble]

Ah, you’re looking for extra photos of Saturn mentioned in the recent article?

I assume the ones you see are the only public images as the data is from “in progress” scientific papers reducing the released info.

[brave coral]

yeah exactly

i understand why you were confused, I assume you thought I meant other JWST images

but yeah I mean other images taken during this saturn observation

[pseudo bramble]

Gotcha gotcha. Afaik what you see is what you get at this point.

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/07/10/join-celebrations-of-webbs-first-year-of-science/

[pseudo bramble]

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-celebrates-first-year-of-science-with-new-image

Looks like quite a few new images from JWST are getting posted in a short time frame for the one year anniversary.

[pseudo bramble]

Got a chance to look at the JWST image in more detail. Wasn't sure exactly what I was looking at so googled around. Seems like the above diagrams are relevant. Am I understanding the JWST image appropriately as indicated by the following image? Green circle is the protoplanetary disk, red lines are the flow/jets.

Was trying to make sure that "dark" is the protoplanetary disk because the dust is thick enough to block the light. Always hard to know what is absorption vs emission vs scattering vs nothing.

[noble quarry]

mmm, plasma jets

[pseudo bramble]

Makes more sense now what this image is showing. JWST image of a protostar released maybe 6 months ago.

[worldly harness]

https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-question-mark-galaxy-photo

[noble quarry]

"Riddle me this Batman Webb!"

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/09/12/webb-confirms-accuracy-of-universes-expansion-rate-measured-by-hubble-deepens-mystery-of-hubble-constant-tension/
2. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/08/24/mid-infrared-instrument-operations-update-3/
3. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/08/21/webb-reveals-intricate-details-in-the-remains-of-a-dying-star/
4. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/08/15/talking-with-webb-using-the-deep-space-network/

[pseudo bramble]

The bot maintaining the legacy of JWST delays.

[wispy sun]

I need to move the bot to a VPS so that the server doesn’t keep on getting unplugged

[noble quarry]

who keeps unplugging a server?

[wispy sun]

Roomba

[noble quarry]

maybe tape down the cord? lol

[wispy sun]

https://www.val.town/ seems like the perfect thing to use for this

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/11/22/nasas-webb-identifies-methane-in-an-exoplanets-atmosphere/

[pseudo bramble]

Good bot.

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/12/06/measuring-the-distances-to-galaxies-with-space-telescopes/

[pseudo bramble]

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/

Quite cool spiral galaxy images by JWST.

[patent shard]

James Webb tell it to scope

That thing takes selfies to check if it’s damaged

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/12/21/supernova-encore-nasas-webb-spots-a-second-lensed-supernova-in-a-distant-galaxy/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2024/04/18/nasas-webb-makes-the-distant-universe-dream-come-true/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2024/05/30/nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-finds-most-distant-known-galaxy/

[wispy sun]

Huh, my script still works?

Nice to know

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2024/06/05/reconnaissance-of-potentially-habitable-worlds-with-nasas-webb/

[pseudo bramble]

Bot with the timely post, nice.

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2024/10/01/webb-researchers-discover-lensed-supernova-confirm-hubble-tension/

[bold bronze]

Awesome

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2024/11/08/monitoring-webbs-mirrors-for-optimal-optics/

[wispy sun]

During each observation the team measures Webb’s pointing stability or ‘jitter,’ which has remained six times better than design requirements.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2024/11/08/monitoring-webbs-mirrors-for-optimal-optics/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2025/02/12/nasas-webb-reveals-the-ancient-surfaces-of-trans-neptunian-objects/

[wispy sun]

It still works??

[noble quarry]

the question now may be whether the webbhook will outlive NASA or not ...

[glad mist]

Isnt NASA how we went to space before SpaceX demonstrated they can do it cheaper? Granted, astronaut safety is a low priority. Also, all safety is out. But other than that

[noble quarry]

getting into more-offtopic, perhaps, but NASA getting tied up in cost-plus contracts with defense primes largely accounts for the expense of the human spaceflight portion of NASA

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2025/04/02/nasas-webb-finds-asteroid-2024-yr4-is-building-sized/

[rain oracle]

Recent NASA JWST Blog Posts

1. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2025/04/18/how-nasas-webb-telescope-supports-our-search-for-life-beyond-earth/

[safe bronze]

Right here

[carmine olive]

hypehpye

[last shadow]

joining this so i will (hopefully) get pinged when it starts

[brave coral]

SAME

[last shadow]

do @everyone's work here?

[safe bronze]

Uh

Apparently not :P

[wispy sun]

I would like to avoid pinging everyone

That would be unfortunate

[brave coral]

i think it would just ping everyone in this thread

i'll probably be asleep anyway 😭

[calm flint]

Do we need a launch cancellation bingo?

[last shadow]

well ping me atleast when its 5 am :P

ill try to stay awke

[safe bronze]

Yup, lol. Not sure if it pings everyone in the thread, or invites the entire server into the thread :P

[modest dune]

besides, we get notifications for every message in a thread still, no?

[calm flint]

Thankfully not.

[last shadow]

I get the unread notification

[carmine olive]

depends what you set it too

^^

[modest dune]

ah I see the default changed yeah, makes sense

[last shadow]

12 hours to go

[safe bronze]

Delay in 3... 2... 1...

[brave coral]

uh oh

[red sail]

Hype!

[last shadow]

math is not my strong suit.. 5+5 = 10 hours till 5am and launch ( i hope )

[modest dune]

<t:1640434800:R> at <t:1640434800:T>

[brave coral]

hoe did you do that?

[bold bronze]

Discord supports unix timestamping

A good site to auto gen one for you: https://hammertime.djdavid98.art/en-GB

[brave coral]

that site sells NFTS of the timestamp lol

[modest dune]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[bold bronze]

Yeah.. just noticed that lol

[brave coral]

it has a really informative "what's an NFT" link. check it out!

[bold bronze]

Might be worth to support something that doesn't use sell "timestamp" NFTs

[brave coral]

oh wait

i mean the "sign in with etherium" link

that one is really informative ;)

lmaoooo

looking at the code the NFT thing is a joke

[last shadow]

u want to buy a piece of time? that is 1116 dollars..
According to this legitimate site https://www.celebritiesstatus.com/elon-musk-has-made-16-million-per-hour/ elon musks makes 4444 dollars a second so he could buy every single time NFT down to the second there is going into the future

[carmine olive]

some days he loses literally billsions of dollars

some days he makes it

[brave coral]

on average he's creating a lot of money for himself

[last shadow]

yeah so if he wants to he can own time with the very official nft's.. i never understood those

[cerulean thorn]

oh cool, dedicated rocket & sat chat ;)

almost factorio :P

[brave coral]

6 months until we get the first pictures

[cerulean thorn]

yeah, Lagrange points aren't exactly close

not to mention all that complicated unfolding

[brave coral]

unfolds

[last shadow]

assuming it goes good..

what % will it succeed? I watched #offtopic message and it never said the %

[brave coral]

if not i dont care what nasa says we going out and rescuing it

[cerulean thorn]

not gonna happen

there is no way to return from there

[brave coral]

ja, und?

[cerulean thorn]

it would be a suicide mission for an astronaut to go there

[brave coral]

uuuuund?

[cerulean thorn]

lol

[brave coral]

hehe

[cerulean thorn]

which will be grayscale :/

like security cameras at night

[last shadow]

will they all be like that??

[cerulean thorn]

yes

the telescope is supposed to be detecting infrared light, VERY faint infrared light

[brave coral]

wtf just blow it up on the landing pad smh

[cerulean thorn]

infrared is also the one that is most likely to pass through interstellar gasses

making stuff that is very faint and very far potentially visible

[carmine olive]

more like

every "picture" is just a bitmap "picture" from 0 to 100% intensity

and each picture is taken at a specific wavelength

we can take multiple pictures at different wavelengths and then map each one to a wavelength in the visible light spectrum

this is what hubble did as well

[brave coral]

wait no wtf it can see visible light and different frequencies of infared

[cerulean thorn]

that thing is so sensitive that if it was pointed towards earth it could see a thief breaking into a store in complete darkness all the way from orbit... assuming only the thief was the heat source, and not the entire damn planet

no, JW is only infrared

hubble is visible light

[brave coral]

This means that Webb's instruments will work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range (in particular in the red and up to the yellow part of the visible spectrum).

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/comparisonWebbVsHubble.html

[cerulean thorn]

the reason they are sending it so far is because the planet itself is too hot and the radiated heat even in orbit would be too much for the very sensitive instruments

[brave coral]

that +Arson's thing means the pics can be in color

actually only Arson's thing means color photographs are possible

[last shadow]

so it does do photos?

all the words over 5 letters flew over my head

[brave coral]

color photos yes

[cerulean thorn]

like really old ones, all yellow :P

[brave coral]

no, more than that

[last shadow]

better than nothing, and i feel like ur making it seem like its worse than it is

[brave coral]

in astrophotography, its common to take an only red picture, an only blue picture, and an only green picture and combine them in post

jwt can do that with 3 frequencies of the infared spectrum

[cerulean thorn]

but then it's false color... which is actually how most space pictures that we have ever seen are

[brave coral]

well it depends on your definition, right? the things JWT will take pictures of will be all reshifted to hell and back

[cerulean thorn]

anyway, not an issue, the most important thing is it should be able to detect the faint infrared radiation from exoplanets... that's huge, because direct imaging of exoplanets was not so successful so far

[last shadow]

So itll look like any space pictures we have currently

[brave coral]

so we will be receiving infra red, but it may have originally been emmited as red, blie, or green

astronomers can calculate the reshift and color correct it back to the original colors that were emmited

or they can be artistic and pick colors to make the photos pretty if they want

[last shadow]

great explanation :D that makes sense

[cerulean thorn]

there is not much red shift on nearby stuff, actually, there is pretty much none

yes, it will be able to look "far away", but that is not as interesting as looking close and actually seeing.. something

knowing where to send the first interstellar space probe will be HUGE

if only fusion would be solved....

[brave coral]

the point of JWT and the reason they chose infra red is so they can see distant redshifted galaxies!

[cerulean thorn]

and exoplanets

[brave coral]

hype

[cerulean thorn]

but yea, very nice to know that the universe is bigger than we think it is...

[last shadow]

whats exoplanet mean

like our planet?

[cerulean thorn]

yea, planet around another star

[last shadow]

oh thats it lmao

[cerulean thorn]

a place to go once we figure out how the f to get there

[brave coral]

lmao

[cerulean thorn]

it could even potentially detect planet where E.T. lives :)

maybe not, but who knows :P

[brave coral]

that would be crazy hype. we'd need to notify spielburg at once

i've done some astrophotography. got some pictures of planets

[last shadow]

can u share them easily?

[brave coral]

let me see if i have any

just this old one i happened to have on google cloud

its a jupe

featuring: great red boi

[last shadow]

i like it

better than i can do with my phone :P

[brave coral]

heh

even simple shots like these are edited. i took a few thousands frames, picked the best 100 or so, and use an astrophotography program to combine them into one

[last shadow]

so if u combine more hte better it looks?

[brave coral]

sometimes, its kind of hard to know beforehand

you gotta try a bunch and see what works

if the air quality is bad, a lot of frames will be bad and you'll need to throw out more frames

keeping more frames means that you'll keep more low quality frames

air quality is not what you normally think of, its sort of how turbulent the atmosphere is

the atmosphere acts like a lense and as it moves the focus changes, etc

[last shadow]

that makes sense but i wouldve never thought of that

im not experienced though my best photograph is a lego car

[brave coral]

if you've ever seen the wavy lines of hot air during a mirage, that's what it can look like

constantly wiggling around

thats why space telescopes are great, they dont need to dal with that bs

[last shadow]

yeah and why those imges look so great

[brave coral]

that pic's not too great, it was one of the first I took and it was in the city

light pollution hurts too

[last shadow]

light pollution would defnitely be a problem yeah

[brave coral]

very cold, very dark, very still air

[cerulean thorn]

air is nice to have, for breathing and stuff, not so great for taking pictures of things that are far away

[last shadow]

have u tried putting modules on ur camera to try and get thru light pollution and atmosphere

[cerulean thorn]

I had heavy distortion with just 600mm lens... it's already bad

[brave coral]

hehe

[cerulean thorn]

for ground telescopes it's worse, if they don't have active compensation

[brave coral]

well there's the thing where they shine a test laser to the upper atmosphere

they expect the test laser produce an exact circle and they can adjust the image in real time to compensate for the atmosphere

[modest dune]

seeing distant galaxies that are more mature than we can explain for their apparent distance, if it happens, would say otherwise

[brave coral]

that laser thing is called adaptive optics

[last shadow]

6 hours

[cerulean thorn]

I got some more ☕ ... hope it will be enough

8 am here, and I was awake all night

[brave coral]

:O

they actually bend the mirror in real time to correct for the atmosphere

[last shadow]

in adaptive optics?

[brave coral]

ye

in the JWT they're gonna have a period of time where they do calibrate the mirrors

[last shadow]

i just want to see space civilizations and see that the galaxy is just a stellaris game

[brave coral]

each of the ....24 ? .... mirrors can be adjusted individually

[last shadow]

Yeah its great, SUPER precise as well

[brave coral]

they're gonna take a test picture of a star and use it to align all the mirrors

[last shadow]

yea i remember that in the video

its really neat stuff

[cerulean thorn]

I think this is the most complicated thing humanity has sent in space beyond earth's close orbit, far more complex than the voyagers or the planetary probes

[ornate marsh]

really I'm just impressed they're getting this thing launched before HST gave up the ghost

[cerulean thorn]

well, maybe competing with the mars rovers

those are crazy complex as well

[carmine olive]

they could but it wouldn't look (as) good

[brave coral]

hubble is a beast, but keep in mind there was a serious flaw with the mirror post launch that needed a manual fix

NO chance for JWT

[carmine olive]

also, did you know the JWT operates at 50K

50K!!

[last shadow]

ill go for humanity to save JWT

[cerulean thorn]

let's not think of that yet...

[brave coral]

https://tenor.com/view/one-direction-astronaut-boy-band-gif-5402206

[cerulean thorn]

tbh it would probably be cheaper to build another one than attempting to save it in any way

[brave coral]

me and the boys suiting up for our 1 way trip to JWT

[last shadow]

i like the left guys hair lmao

[carmine olive]

would be way easier to launch one on a starship

[cerulean thorn]

yeah.... but that one is not flying yet so... we'll see

[ornate marsh]

I dunno, going out to L2 to repair it would be expanding the range of human space exploration

[carmine olive]

I believe it is significantly easier to finish a non-reusable starship and then build a james-webb equivalent than rebuild the james webb

[ornate marsh]

if space exploration was still a cool thing maybe it would be worth doing

[carmine olive]

I think that
nasa would rather set up a moon base
than send humans to L2 and back

for the PR

[brave coral]

i mean, same

[carmine olive]

god I just

nasa junh needs to not fuck up the PR on this lol

[ornate marsh]

set up a moon base so you can send humans to L2

[carmine olive]

"send humans to space? we did that in the 70s"

[cerulean thorn]

moon has stuffz on it... $$$

moon base not pointless... it's actually very cheap to send stuff back from the moon, the hard part is sending things there, but once some industry is set up, a rail launcher is all that's needed, not even rockets

no atmosphere, no friction, point that thing towards earth, power up the magnets, done

[last shadow]

I wonder what the payoff time of setting up a moon base would be

like invest X billion when do you get X billion back, 10 years, 20 years?

[carmine olive]

get 14X billion back in the short term

nasa is an incredibly good ROI investment

[last shadow]

ROI?

[modest dune]

return on investment

[last shadow]

return on investment investment?

[carmine olive]

hehe

https://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-not-waste/

anyway basically
nasa doesn't need to be profitable to be good for the economy

[cerulean thorn]

it's very interesting and few people know that lots of things that we just take for granted today have been invented at nasa

for example, what everyone of us carry in their pockets now...

[last shadow]

wallets or phones

[cerulean thorn]

multiple things... the camera, the concept of a cpu, the phased array antenna

[last shadow]

they made the camera huh

[carmine olive]

oh yeah, that's excluding the actual fact that they invent things

:p

[ornate marsh]

not to mention things like GPS

[last shadow]

or launching a person on the moon

[cerulean thorn]

yea... cmos sensor which is used by pretty much every digital camera in existence today

is nasa invention

[carmine olive]

james webb claims to have "invented ten new technologies during it's development that they knew would need to be invented during it's development"

[last shadow]

have they listed those?

[carmine olive]

s/james web/random article I read a while back/

[cerulean thorn]

probably theres a ton of academia papers about it

just not something that common folk know

[last shadow]

im gonna (try) to sleep and come back when its going to launch

[cerulean thorn]

did you play your base all night?

or evening

[brave coral]

with luck i'll wake up to a successful JWT as a Christmas present

well, successful launch anyway

or should i set my alarm? decisions decisions

[last shadow]

stay up ill be up

[last shadow]

I played it till an hour or two again I migth get back on I cant sleep

I have like 20 thing si have to improve

[cerulean thorn]

4h 30m left

[modest dune]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nT7JGZMbtM

[calm flint]

30 minutes to the NASA show starts. Perfect window to get a snack & a good cup of coffee.

[cerulean thorn]

https://xkcd.com/2559/

xkcd: December 25th Launch

Update: Santa has been destroyed by the range safety officer.

[cerulean thorn]

so cringe

[safe bronze]

lol

[plucky merlin]

Don't worry, the launch will go flawlessly, and JWST will deploy perfectly, and then it will live a long and healthy life past its projected lifetime giving us fantastic science for a long time to come

[calm flint]

~10 years, until fuel is depleted.

[cerulean thorn]

station keeping fuel

it might still be operational but slowly drift away from earth

[plucky merlin]

They will likely enter a longer period of limited operational capability when they get lower on fuel, so it can probably last even longer

[cerulean thorn]

pointing direction is controlled with reaction wheels, which only use electricity, and it won't have any shortage of that as long as electric system is working

[calm flint]

Someone mentioned 5 years of high activity, and a total length of 10 years.

[somber peak]

High risk, high reward so🤞

[calm flint]

It's not just about being positioned, it is also about being cooled so that heat infra doesn't interfere with observed infra.

Though perhaps that's also solved by electricity alone.

[plucky merlin]

Official NASA stream rather than the unofficial one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nT7JGZMbtM

[cerulean thorn]

super cringe

[plucky merlin]

Watch this one instead, it's such high-quality commentary and I didn't even realize it wasn't official for a while https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rARTOhbLDg

[cerulean thorn]

ah yes, NSF, of course

[safe bronze]

Have you checked the pins yet?

[plucky merlin]

It's too important to leave pins up to chance

[cerulean thorn]

nasa is always so cringy with their children doing space science... c'mon, gimme a break

[plucky merlin]

Did she just say it's the Nerd Center of Space Launch?

[carmine olive]

imagine being the guy with responsibility for launch termination

also nasa spaceflight is like ~10 sec faster

[somber peak]

image being the guy who had to issue the termination, the politics aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[calm flint]

Shouldn't be much of an issue. You just have a set of parameters, they're either acceptable, or not.

[cerulean thorn]

phew, didn't blow up on the pad

[carmine olive]

you're still a human pushing a button

[carmine olive]

no one would blame you for it

damn clouds

[somber peak]

lesgoo

[carmine olive]

whered the rockt go

[cerulean thorn]

clouds ate it

[carmine olive]

what the hell is this 3d animation lmao

[cerulean thorn]

eh, it's not spacex...

[carmine olive]

fair

this is actually decent if they don't have a good camera shot on it

hypehypye!!!!!

fairing separation :o

[cerulean thorn]

wheeee

[carmine olive]

they got a camera shot of the fairing sep!

incredible

huh, they goin straight to L2

no earth orbit

[somber peak]

just one micro asteroid and that would be it

on the fabric

[calm flint]

Tharr she blows!

[plucky merlin]

Interesting, its altitude is temporarily going down based on the trajectory they chose

[cerulean thorn]

it uses earth's own gravity to accelerate even more

[somber peak]

yeah

[cerulean thorn]

already beyond escape velocity

[somber peak]

enough horizontal speed and you go zoom

lol

[carmine olive]

sep 🎉

[cerulean thorn]

wheeeeee

[cerulean thorn]

👏

[safe bronze]

Shiny

[cerulean thorn]

yeah, the entire thing is designed to reflect as much sunlight as possible

[carmine olive]

hehe good point

[cerulean thorn]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FHY_WrkWUAY4WvQ?format=jpg

[somber peak]

delicious

[cerulean thorn]

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html

[calm flint]

So 1 month of travel, then an unknown time for calibration & tests.

[somber peak]

ye 30 days to l2

[eternal oar]

Damn this SpaceEx update looks 🔥🔥🔥

[plucky merlin]

Nice JWST wallpaper for your phone's lock screen

[normal portal]

the sun? 😏

[safe bronze]

Eeh

That might cause some cooling issues :P

[normal portal]

and good luck with aligning the mirrors

[carmine olive]

"might"

[plucky merlin]

That's a really bright idea

[glad mist]

Is there an article discussing velocity changes over the next 30 days?

[safe bronze]

Velocity changes?

Velocity relative to what?

[modest dune]

it's already 2.4% of the distance to L2

[normal portal]

damn

[safe bronze]

Iirc there will be two burns, probably a course correction and an orbital insertion at L2

Other than that the constant gravitational deceleration

[modest dune]

although I guess it'll slow down a lot as it approaches the destination

[safe bronze]

It'll have to slow back down from 9 km/s to basically 0...

So the last bit will probably be pretty slow

[glad mist]

They said it covers roughly 25% of the distance in 3 days. Then the remaining distance over 27 days.

[safe bronze]

Yup, engine cutoff should be when it reaches its highest speed

[normal portal]

what if smol stone, w/ high speed, hit james?

[calm flint]

The satellite is wrapped in metal foil to deflect radiation.
Foil is basically paper & paper beats rock. So it's fine.

[normal portal]

aaah

good thinking of the designers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aICaAEXDJQQ

[plucky merlin]

This is a great video btw, LOTS of novel engineering information about JWST that you won't see in any other videos, even Scott Manley's

[normal portal]

yep 👍

re-fuelling and crafting of satellites in space sounds really interesting

[plucky merlin]

https://twitter.com/cbs_spacenews/status/1474742609650274307

William Harwood (@cbs_spacenews)

Ariane5/JWST: Meanwhile, NASA reports the telescope is powered up, communicating with flight controllers and is correctly oriented with respect to the sun; all six reaction wheels are powered up and working normally

Twitter · Dec 25, 2021, 2:03 PM

[cerulean thorn]

Reaction wheel amazing tech

Basically a kid on a swing

Pushing against nothing, just own inertia

[short loom]

I'm just waiting for foone on Twitter to wake up and start posting.

[eternal oar]

Foone?

[short loom]

I think they worked on JWST a long time ago

[last shadow]

i watc hed it launch on my phone at 5am looked just like launching a factorio rocket

[short loom]

"Capable of returning one megalitre of vanilla-flavoured science."

[calm flint]

Any groundbreaking launch should include one fish, for good luck.

[brave coral]

MERRY CHRISTMAS

[wispy sun]

https://xkcd.com/2559/

xkcd: December 25th Launch

Update: Santa has been destroyed by the range safety officer.

[brave coral]

already 7% of the way there

7.3% now!

[last shadow]

itll take a month to get there right?

[brave coral]

yeah

[carmine olive]

it slows down as it goes away

like how throwing a ball upwards travales half the distance in 3/4ths of the time

[cerulean thorn]

next major space event.... B4S20 testing, hopefully