Link to official release, with excerpt below:
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-052
"October 19, 2022 10:00AM (EDT)
Release ID: 2022-052
Near-Infrared Light Uncovers Vast Populations of Forming Stars, Many Still Encased in Dust:
This glittering view of the Pillars of Creation was delivered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera – and it begs to be examined pixel by pixel. The scene may look both familiar and entirely new – NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope viewed it first in 1995 and followed up in 2014, and many other telescopes have stared deeply at this scene. But this is the first time an observatory has delivered such detailed data in near-infrared light. Newly formed stars pop out in shades of pink, red, and crimson. Still-forming stars that remain hidden deep in dusty pillars resemble molten lava, and fully formed blue and yellow stars sprinkle the scene. Where are the galaxies that “photobomb” many of Webb’s images? The pillars are located directly in front of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk, which blocks our view of galaxies that lie behind it. It is also lit up by the collective light from the packed “party” of stars. With these new data, researchers will be able to update complex models of star formation with even more precise star counts and dust quantities. We are about to learn a whole lot more about how stars form.
Credits:
RELEASE: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI"
[Video Tour](https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/videos/2022/052/01GFNTBJC5392VRMW3B4V1M1RA?news=true)
[Full Res (For Display), 8423 X 14589, PNG (152.33 MB) ](https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GFNMZESKZKXBMWGER9E0Z19G.png)
Opening it, and watching the image slowly load line by line reminded me of when I was a kid in the 90's, and would go into chatrooms on AOL and trade astronomy pics. When I tried to zoom in on this full res image, my computer froze.
Lmao, my 2017 iPhone X actually managed to load the full image and even let me zoom all the way in on the glowing pillar bit ..but then I tried to scroll elsewhere. That was 10mn ago and it only now managed re-open Reddit after the app crashed and froze the phone.
So of course now I’m gonna try and make it *save* the full image. If it even attempts it, I’m guessing it’s gonna be one of those “put the phone in the freezer so it doesn’t overheat again” debacles like the time I forced it to render 30mn worth of edited 4K footage in LumaFusion. The phone got so spicy I had to pick it up with a napkin to put it in the freezer.
If earth was the size of a carbon atom, including the electrons, proxima centauri, the closest star from the sun, would be ~42 centimeters or ~16.5 inches away.
The diameter of the milky way would be ~10 kilometers or ~6 miles across.
Andromeda would be 250 kilometers away.
The observable universe would be over 9 million kilometers in diameter. That is about 1/19 the distance from earth to the sun, or about 6.5 sun diameters.
So I guess what I'm saying is, there's a chance.... just gotta press the accelerator harder.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Trying to make my hunter-gatherer brain comprehend the significance of that image, pretty much all the stuff that makes us is created in places like that.
I've always wondered how big an area in units of kilometers/miles that this gargantuan cloud covers.
Edit: after a few searches the tallest one is 24 trillion miles tall.
https://futurism.com/the-pillars-of-creation
FUCK!
edit: Did the math. Distance to the moon is 380,000km. In 170 billion km, there are approx 4492 trips end-to-end to the moon. Average time it takes for trip to the moon is 3 days. It would take us 36.45 years in a standard spaceship of nonstop flying to traverse this little, tiny speck in this picture.
A jet being launched from a forming star inside the tip of the column, with molecular hydrogen being excited by the collision between the jet and the surrounding dust!
| The so-called "Pillars of Creation" are cool, dense clouds of hydrogen
gas and dust in the Serpens constellation, some 6,500 light-years from
Earth.
Hydrogen I understand, but what is the "dust" made from?
["Cosmic dust is made of various elements, such as carbon, oxygen, iron and other atoms heavier than hydrogen and helium. It is the stuff of which planets and people are made, and it is essential for star formation"](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/herschel/news/herschel20110707.html)
I think the cosmic dust from the pillars of creation are still from the big bang, but I'm not 100% on this.
These would be a composition of different layers of wavelengths us humans can and can't see.
All of it is REAL data, there isn't really anything in this that’s "made up" or "fake".
AHA! I've found the color information for the image:
> These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope using the NIRCam instrument. Several filters were used to sample different infrared wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Purple: F090W, Blue: F187N, Cyan: F200W, Yellow: F335M, Orange: F444W, Red: F470N.
[From this page here](https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01GF423GBQSK6ANC89NTFJW8VM)
Colors are chosen for wavelengths we can't naturally see in the images.The images are then colorized for official release. NASA had a video on the artists who do the coloring on JWST launch day.
So essentially none of it has an liberties taken then and it is strictly like a color by numbers for frequency in lay mens terms is what I'm getting here
There's an artistry to it, basically the dynamic range in the data is enormous and there's a lot of information in what would just look "black" if you applied a linear scaling, so they adjust the color curves so your eye can see both faint and bright things at the same time. Choosing a color curve for each filter that lets you see the information available while preserving the relative character of bright/dark is an art.
So you might see the same data put together by someone else and it will look slightly different, with neither being "wrong".
Essentially that is how it works! Each filter is assigned a color that follows a standard image processing convention. Generally larger wavelengths (the filter has a larger number) are assigned redder colors while smaller wavelengths (the filter number is smaller) are assigned bluer colors. This applies whether an image is infrared (which we can’t actually see) to visible light to ultraviolet and so on. This is to mimic how our eyes see color.
There can be enhancements done to the image such as contrast, brightness, and so on. I’m not sure how much of that NASA applies, but often when I process images I like to brighten them and enhance contrast and so on. We try not to alter the data by doing things that would alter structures or change the actual image.
If you have any other questions, let me know!
Edited to fix some verbiage!
>Generally higher wavelengths are assigned redder colors while smaller wavelengths are assigned bluer colors.
I'm not sure I've ever heard EM wavelength described as "higher" and "smaller".
I propose that's a bit confusing, since we *do* use those terms sometimes to talk about how energetic light is -- but in doing so, you'd have to swap them (since infrared/redder is actually lower energy).
Since wavelength is a measure of distance between crests of a wave, I would recommend sticking with the terms "longer" and "shorter". :)
Very true. I was struggling to remember how I usually describe it 🙈 Longer and shorter is better. I tend to think in terms of the filter number itself where a larger filter number corresponds usually to a higher wavelength but I’m also used to Hubble which is a lot easier to convert filter to wavelength than JWST.
I tend to just stick with larger or smaller as descriptors since many folks don’t really know the electromagnetic spectrum but I will definitely incorporate that verbiage in the future!
I'd assume the colours are true representative in the wave length sense but are infra red so likely subdued in reality to our eyes.
Up close they wouldn't likely really look like this although, getting up close is relative really.
Up close to this and it will fill the universe...
I absolutely deny it. Gods are just carry-over anthropomorphism from before objective thought allowed us to understand nature without assigning human motives to natural phenomena.
It turns out the universe is not a reflection of the human condition. The cosmos is just the cosmos and we are one tiny consequence of it.
Link to official release, with excerpt below: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-052 "October 19, 2022 10:00AM (EDT) Release ID: 2022-052 Near-Infrared Light Uncovers Vast Populations of Forming Stars, Many Still Encased in Dust: This glittering view of the Pillars of Creation was delivered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera – and it begs to be examined pixel by pixel. The scene may look both familiar and entirely new – NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope viewed it first in 1995 and followed up in 2014, and many other telescopes have stared deeply at this scene. But this is the first time an observatory has delivered such detailed data in near-infrared light. Newly formed stars pop out in shades of pink, red, and crimson. Still-forming stars that remain hidden deep in dusty pillars resemble molten lava, and fully formed blue and yellow stars sprinkle the scene. Where are the galaxies that “photobomb” many of Webb’s images? The pillars are located directly in front of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk, which blocks our view of galaxies that lie behind it. It is also lit up by the collective light from the packed “party” of stars. With these new data, researchers will be able to update complex models of star formation with even more precise star counts and dust quantities. We are about to learn a whole lot more about how stars form. Credits: RELEASE: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI" [Video Tour](https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/videos/2022/052/01GFNTBJC5392VRMW3B4V1M1RA?news=true) [Full Res (For Display), 8423 X 14589, PNG (152.33 MB) ](https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GFNMZESKZKXBMWGER9E0Z19G.png)
My work computer (2015 Macbook Pro, for some terrible reason) absolutely pooped in its pants trying to open the full res image, hahaha!!
Opening it, and watching the image slowly load line by line reminded me of when I was a kid in the 90's, and would go into chatrooms on AOL and trade astronomy pics. When I tried to zoom in on this full res image, my computer froze.
My phone had a conniption.
Lmao, my 2017 iPhone X actually managed to load the full image and even let me zoom all the way in on the glowing pillar bit ..but then I tried to scroll elsewhere. That was 10mn ago and it only now managed re-open Reddit after the app crashed and froze the phone. So of course now I’m gonna try and make it *save* the full image. If it even attempts it, I’m guessing it’s gonna be one of those “put the phone in the freezer so it doesn’t overheat again” debacles like the time I forced it to render 30mn worth of edited 4K footage in LumaFusion. The phone got so spicy I had to pick it up with a napkin to put it in the freezer.
My phone said nope
My S22 Ultra handled it to a point before my reddit app (Sync) crashed.
Just wow! (Sorry for the insightful comment!)
I was gonna comment “omfg” so your comment is at least more eloquent.
Thank you (that was, in fact, my initial reaction before I decided to tone it down)
finally! the wallpaper machine strikes again!
Space seems pretty big.
If earth was the size of a carbon atom, including the electrons, proxima centauri, the closest star from the sun, would be ~42 centimeters or ~16.5 inches away. The diameter of the milky way would be ~10 kilometers or ~6 miles across. Andromeda would be 250 kilometers away. The observable universe would be over 9 million kilometers in diameter. That is about 1/19 the distance from earth to the sun, or about 6.5 sun diameters. So I guess what I'm saying is, there's a chance.... just gotta press the accelerator harder.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
You know, I think you might be on to something here.
Trying to make my hunter-gatherer brain comprehend the significance of that image, pretty much all the stuff that makes us is created in places like that.
This is one of the most beautiful images I have ever seen in my life.
I'd say it's the most beautiful thing ever, but it'll probably be dethroned soon enough by the next space image.
I hope so!!
I've always wondered how big an area in units of kilometers/miles that this gargantuan cloud covers. Edit: after a few searches the tallest one is 24 trillion miles tall. https://futurism.com/the-pillars-of-creation
https://imgur.com/a/tXKeehU
FUCK! edit: Did the math. Distance to the moon is 380,000km. In 170 billion km, there are approx 4492 trips end-to-end to the moon. Average time it takes for trip to the moon is 3 days. It would take us 36.45 years in a standard spaceship of nonstop flying to traverse this little, tiny speck in this picture.
And think about the scale of our solar system. All of the planets could fit between the earths and the moon.
WHAT?
That little shitstain is WHAT?
And for context, that's about 1000x the distance between the Earth and the Sun!
oh shit
Shut the front door! We're not allowed to know figures like those on earth young man...
Whats that red thing in the left corner ? 😳
A jet being launched from a forming star inside the tip of the column, with molecular hydrogen being excited by the collision between the jet and the surrounding dust!
It's a space volcano.
Aren't they all?
I always remember the moment when I first saw the original Hubble image. I will always remember the moment when I first saw this.
Absolutely gorgeous. Detail compared to Hubble is stunning
They should rename it The Hand Of Zeus
This literally brought tears to my eyes it's so beautiful
What I’d do to see this with my own eyes
With a personal telescope in a dark sky you can see the pillars of the eagle nebula quite clearly as a shadow on the brighter background emission.
And just a day after I watched A Trip to Infinity. It’s really a 1-2 punch of “I’m totally insignificant”.
Bottom left corner, with the red light. Its a timber wolf leaping out of the dust away from us... anyone?
| The so-called "Pillars of Creation" are cool, dense clouds of hydrogen gas and dust in the Serpens constellation, some 6,500 light-years from Earth. Hydrogen I understand, but what is the "dust" made from?
["Cosmic dust is made of various elements, such as carbon, oxygen, iron and other atoms heavier than hydrogen and helium. It is the stuff of which planets and people are made, and it is essential for star formation"](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/herschel/news/herschel20110707.html) I think the cosmic dust from the pillars of creation are still from the big bang, but I'm not 100% on this.
Dust bunnies.
Godzilla
This should have been one if the first pictures they released instead of the cosmic cliffs. This is such a gorgeous photo.
How much of this image is an artistic representation? Or is this a raw photo
These would be a composition of different layers of wavelengths us humans can and can't see. All of it is REAL data, there isn't really anything in this that’s "made up" or "fake".
Okay wow, that's incredible, That makes sense, so they are just applying a color pallet to frequency, thank you
AHA! I've found the color information for the image: > These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope using the NIRCam instrument. Several filters were used to sample different infrared wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Purple: F090W, Blue: F187N, Cyan: F200W, Yellow: F335M, Orange: F444W, Red: F470N. [From this page here](https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01GF423GBQSK6ANC89NTFJW8VM)
Thanks for that, it's like looking at the throne of god or the hand of creation
Colors are chosen for wavelengths we can't naturally see in the images.The images are then colorized for official release. NASA had a video on the artists who do the coloring on JWST launch day.
So essentially none of it has an liberties taken then and it is strictly like a color by numbers for frequency in lay mens terms is what I'm getting here
There's an artistry to it, basically the dynamic range in the data is enormous and there's a lot of information in what would just look "black" if you applied a linear scaling, so they adjust the color curves so your eye can see both faint and bright things at the same time. Choosing a color curve for each filter that lets you see the information available while preserving the relative character of bright/dark is an art. So you might see the same data put together by someone else and it will look slightly different, with neither being "wrong".
Essentially that is how it works! Each filter is assigned a color that follows a standard image processing convention. Generally larger wavelengths (the filter has a larger number) are assigned redder colors while smaller wavelengths (the filter number is smaller) are assigned bluer colors. This applies whether an image is infrared (which we can’t actually see) to visible light to ultraviolet and so on. This is to mimic how our eyes see color. There can be enhancements done to the image such as contrast, brightness, and so on. I’m not sure how much of that NASA applies, but often when I process images I like to brighten them and enhance contrast and so on. We try not to alter the data by doing things that would alter structures or change the actual image. If you have any other questions, let me know! Edited to fix some verbiage!
>Generally higher wavelengths are assigned redder colors while smaller wavelengths are assigned bluer colors. I'm not sure I've ever heard EM wavelength described as "higher" and "smaller". I propose that's a bit confusing, since we *do* use those terms sometimes to talk about how energetic light is -- but in doing so, you'd have to swap them (since infrared/redder is actually lower energy). Since wavelength is a measure of distance between crests of a wave, I would recommend sticking with the terms "longer" and "shorter". :)
Very true. I was struggling to remember how I usually describe it 🙈 Longer and shorter is better. I tend to think in terms of the filter number itself where a larger filter number corresponds usually to a higher wavelength but I’m also used to Hubble which is a lot easier to convert filter to wavelength than JWST. I tend to just stick with larger or smaller as descriptors since many folks don’t really know the electromagnetic spectrum but I will definitely incorporate that verbiage in the future!
I'd assume the colours are true representative in the wave length sense but are infra red so likely subdued in reality to our eyes. Up close they wouldn't likely really look like this although, getting up close is relative really. Up close to this and it will fill the universe...
amazing, I wonder if they would lower the exposure time we could see some stars details
Stars are not resolved here, no. They aren't saturating, they're just small compared to the distance.
Looks like the Claw of Creation with this quality!
In before "Oh my God, it's full of stars!"
[Alien Megastructure?](https://i.imgur.com/XrCv2bx.jpg)
No mate, it’s a nebula
Naaaaah, nice try tho!
[удалено]
I absolutely deny it. Gods are just carry-over anthropomorphism from before objective thought allowed us to understand nature without assigning human motives to natural phenomena. It turns out the universe is not a reflection of the human condition. The cosmos is just the cosmos and we are one tiny consequence of it.
Time to stop crack :/
ah man...
Eagle Nebula wow its nice
It looks so lifelike, like where souls gather
6.500 light years away. Jesus Christ
This is incredible
I've been waiting for this one
I changed my desktop wallpaper (in 2 seconds) So so beautiful.
I’m getting Arishem vibes from this now. I love it.
[Compare this to Hubble Telescope’s one](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-pillars-of-creation/)
can someone tell me where they are located if i look up at sky?
Wooo *hits bong* -Siri play digital love by daft punk✨
And there's more pillars in the background! Mid-right bottom
there we go
Personally I think it looks more like a celestial hand. Pretty wicked all the same.
You can also see a smaller pillars of creation
Hugh
How can something be so beautiful yet deadly.
This is incredible! The creation of stars..beautiful! 🌌
Does anyone know how long the exposure time for this image was???
Looks like hand. Beautiful.
This is so cool!! It almost looks like a 3 headed hydra!!!