Bill Nelson gave a layman's comparison saying that if you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger and extended your arm all the way. The area of the sky covered by that grain of sand is about the same as the area in the image.

Now imagine the whole sky.

Now that’s something a Lehmann can understand

Was I the only one who thought that the white house news briefing yesterday showing the first image was totally lame?

Late, useless talk, and then it seemed to completely missed conveying the significance of what was being shown. That brief did nothing to motivate the general public to support science, research, and the space program.

The picture yesterday with the ones released today are truly amazing when you really understand what it is showing.

Mike C.

Was I the only one who thought that the white house news briefing yesterday showing the first image was totally lame?

Late, useless talk, and then it seemed to completely missed conveying the significance of what was being shown. That brief did nothing to motivate the general public to support science, research, and the space program.

The picture yesterday with the ones released today are truly amazing when you really understand what it is showing.

Mike C.

I didn't watch the briefing, but this is difficult to get across to anyone who doesn't already care. There are no words that can describe how big that image is. There are no words to describe how big a singe pixel of that image is.

Its easy to say each of those blurry spots is a galaxy but a galaxy is much much to big to imagine.

If you started counting when the pyramids were built, you coudl just barely have finished counting stars in our galaxy.

If you started counting galaxies when the pyramids were built you would be nearly finished counting galaxies - each of which has so many stars it would take thousands of years to count them.

And stars are really too big to imagine - in those Parker Solar Probe images the smallest things you can see are about the size of the largest things you have seen on earth.


I don't know how any set of words can convey that image.


Was I the only one who thought that the white house news briefing yesterday showing the first image was totally lame?

Late, useless talk, and then it seemed to completely missed conveying the significance of what was being shown. That brief did nothing to motivate the general public to support science, research, and the space program.

The picture yesterday with the ones released today are truly amazing when you really understand what it is showing.

Mike C.

Parker Solar Probe? Which images are those?

I really have no words that can convey what I feel when I view the pictures and think of the people that made this possible. Humbled will have to do.

On the darkest nights in the middle of nowhere the sky looks like a haze of stars in every direction. Stars on top of stars, like dust in the sky. The Webb telescope takes a minescule dot in that vast sky and magnifies it so that the stars in that dot look like a haze of stars in every direction. Stars on top of stars, like dust in the sky.

It is said that the universe is 13.772 billion years old, give or take 59 million years. (More than a few scientists think they have it to an accuracy of 0.42840546035%.) Do a search...

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/science/firstLight.html
Says Webb is looking back 13.5 billion years.

What would it take to add 0.272 billion years to that?

If we could see just 1.976% more, we'd be beyond the beginning.

Would we see a brilliant light, complete darkness, or a haze of stars in every direction; stars on top of stars, like dust in the sky?

1.976% more. Would we be beyond the beginning, or would we see a similar never ending plethora of stars beyond the beginning? Would we find we are right, or would we have to rethink it all and marvel at how truly infinitesimal we really are?

Drops of ink to make us think...

After seeing the high res pictures today I’m reaffirming in my head out infinitesimal we already know we are!

Murray

Until last year, SWMBO had never seen mountains, deserts, canyons or stars. It was all good, but once her eyes adapted to the darkness, star watching from Rainbow Point (Bryce Canyon) at 0200 was her biggest surprise.

Until last year, SWMBO had never seen mountains, deserts, canyons or stars. It was all good, but once her eyes adapted to the darkness, star watching from Rainbow Point (Bryce Canyon) at 0200 was her biggest surprise.

If you want to see the most stars you can, go to Hawaii and visit the Mona Kea visitor's center about 9000 ft elevation. When I went there some years ago, they would set out a large number of amateur telescopes and you could view all sorts of cool things. The view of Andromeda was awesome from a 24 inch telescope they had, so clear and big, it looked fake almost.

But by far the most impressive thing is not using any telescopes at all, but just your dark adapter eye. The coastal fog seals off the lower elevations, and you get waiting for it get dark, but the stars are so bright you can walk around by starlight.

The number of stars you can see is stunning. Every bit of sky is just filled with stars. No picture can do it justice. I've been in rural USA on a crystal clear moonless night, but this was 10 times that impressive. When astronauts describe how bright the stars are in outer space, I get a sense of how that would be from this experience.

Going to the Mona Kea visitor's center was the highlight of my Hawaii trip.

I understand they shutdown the visitor center during COVID so you might want to check ahead if they are still doing the night observation thing at the visitor's center.

Mike C.

As you look further away, further back in time, object seem to be receding ever faster. This makes them dimmer and redder and harder to see than just distance would cause. That is one of the reasons an infrared telesecope like JWT is important it can see objects that are so far away that their light is shifted into the infrared.

Its easiest to think about if instead of counting time back from now you count forward from the big bang.

Then numbers I've seen suggest JWST can potentially see out to about 200M years after the big bang. No telescope can see much further because the first stars were formed just a little earlier than that (~180M years after the big bang). Earlier than that the universe had been dark since the big bang. Those so called "dark ages" are at the moment invisible to scientists.

There is a proposal for a huge radio telescope (PUMA) about a solid square kilometer, with 30,000 dishes in a giant phased-array that can see hydrogen emissions from that time.

Earlier though the univers gets bright again. About 300,000 years after it was formed the universe was a white-hot ball of plasma that finally cooled enough that the light continued to propagate - that is the "cosmic microwave background" and has been studied extensively with radio telescopes

Before that the universe was opaque, but there are hints at what happened earlier that can be seen in the CMB light.

There is a good wikipedia article at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronolog ... e_universe



If anyone is super bored, here is a talk I gave on some of the telescope hardware engineering that is used to look at the very early universe (just the one tiny part of that that my group worked on)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9qh5b1vflw6c9 ... .pptx?dl=0

This is from the view of cosmologists who think all these galaxies just et in the way of seeing the interseting stuff. (page 3 has a timeline of the universe)

I for one am mightily impressed.

I for one am mightily impressed.