Quote:
Originally Posted by drewprops
The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are set to be released to the public on July 12th. I anticipate we'll be talking about them.
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Hear, hear!
I was one of the many folks who were excitedly, anxiously, nervously watching its launch months ago and its deployment over the agonizing weeks that followed, and I've been following as much information as I could find about its various alignments and tests since then. The alignment evaluation image that
they released back in March was already kind of mind-blowing in how clearly you could see the shapes of distant galaxies in the tiny fractions of an arc second. (full image:
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/f...ge_labeled.png)
Despite one of the mirrors
already having sustained damaged by a micrometeoroid, the fully processed images coming out in a couple weeks are supposedly
very impressive, or at least to the astronomers and engineers who have seen it already and are teasing us. Speculation I've heard from astronomers and telescope operators on social media is that they'll probably be correcting for the damage in post-processing software or by making subtle adjustments to that mirror and the surrounding ones to try to compensate, and that the damage really is pretty minor overall, barely noticeable if you didn't know where to find it. The most likely visible effect of the damage would be slight haloing or "star streaks" around very bright subjects, kind of like what you see in that evaluation image but much smaller.
I'm so excited to see what the more PR-friendly results with false colors will be.