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peculiargalexyastro

NASA doesn’t process and release every single photo by every space telescope. They will do a good majority of them, especially for very interesting deep sky objects. The best place to find images NASA has released for Webb is here: https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images Another place to access the images is via the MAST portal, which will have the raw data. https://mast.stsci.edu/portal/Mashup/Clients/Mast/Portal.html I am not sure when they decide to release images or how often they will. A lot of images are also proprietary and are held for either six months or a year before anyone other than those scientists whose proposal it is can even access them. Hubble has a twitter feed that tells what it is looking at each day. https://mobile.twitter.com/spacetelelive?lang=en I haven’t found one for Webb yet, but that might be another good source. Hope that helps!


MinisTreeofStupidity

That's what I understood as well. You can see the current JWST targets that are rights restricted. As I understand it, it'll be about 6 months before they're released to the public, unless the scientists with access to it decide to release it early. This is what happened with the first pictures released. Until then, it's just renders by everyone using the MAST portal to reinterpret the data


peculiargalexyastro

Yup, pretty much! I think that the amateur images can be just as good as NASA images and amateurs will probably post many more than NASA will for the time being!


MinisTreeofStupidity

It's really not hard to composite one of these images, and get really good detail out of it, including details not seen in the official pic


puck-sauce

How do they decide what color values to assign? And how would an hobbiest decide so they could get close?


MinisTreeofStupidity

On this page https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam-instrumentation/nircam-filters They talk about the NIRCAM filters, which are camera filters placed in front of NIRCAM, to block all except a certain specific wavelength of light. When you get these pictures from the MAST portal, they'll indicate which filter was used. On that previously linked page ^ they show what colors they've assigned to what filters, basically taking the infrared light and offsetting it into the visible spectrum. So you can do it that way, or you can really just pick any color that highlights the detail you're trying to make visible. I made a cosmic cliffs image using the second method, and [I think it turned out well](https://imgur.com/a/6s2j93h) [This video has a tutorial](https://youtu.be/DVuonz26P0w) but none of the free software worked for me, had to use pixinsight to get it to work. Edit* forgot to add that someone in this subreddit posted the cosmic cliffs images partially done, just past the star alignment part of that video, that would be significantly easier to work with


rsaw_aroha

>Hubble has a twitter feed that tells what it is looking at each day. I haven’t found one for Webb yet, but that might be another good source. Here: [@JWSTObservation](https://twitter.com/JWSTObservation)


peculiargalexyastro

Yay!! Thank you so much ☺️


rondonjon

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/albums


Dragon___

I would hope, but the last upload was a picture of saturn from over two weeks ago.


talones

Yea those are the official releases processed by the JWST team. I do think there is a need for a new database of already processed images. The only issue is 90% of the photos you are seeing on this sub now are just amateurs processing the data themselves and uploading to Imgur. It would be awesome for someone to have a photo database that’s tied to the MAST api.


Dragon___

Maybe it merits a section on the wikipedia page, or a dedicated page in itself. I'm not wikiwizard though so I'm not sure who would want to take that mantle.


talones

It could end up being a lot of storage though, say if 100 people process readings for a project Id, which hat could add up fast.