NASA doesn't just point a telescope at space and snap a photo. JWST's data needs to be translated from infrared to visible light — then it becomes an image.
The James Webb Space Telescope recently stunned the world with its first images of space, including a deep field image that showed the infrared universe in more depth than ever before.
Scientists select what instruments and what wavelengths they want to use for their observations, and the filter wheels rotate to put the corresponding element in front of the instrument’s sensors. While introducing moving parts into such a complex piece of technology is always a risk, engineers are well-practiced with working with this kind of hardware by now, as similar filter wheels are used in other space-based telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Combining black and white to make color DePasquale will receive a varying number of images depending on how many filters the researchers have chosen, then he will combine them into a single image. By mapping data from these filters onto color channels, he creates a color image. For this work, he’ll use a combination of general-purpose graphics editing software like Adobe Photoshop and specialty astronomical software like PixInsight, which was originally developed for amateur astrophotography.
In other images, like the Webb image of the Carina nebula, which was processed by DePasquale’s colleague Alyssa Pagan, each of the six different filters was assigned its own color to pick out all of the different features of the nebula. But that didn’t work so well for the deep field. “When we have a deep field image or an image with a lot of galaxies in the background, my approach generally is to use face-on spiral galaxies as the white reference point for the entire image,” he explained.
But overall, DePasquale says he aims for a general consistency between images collected by Webb and those collected by Hubble. After all, regardless of how the data is collected, the objects being imaged are similar. “Some people will have a philosophical argument about the colors in this image, because the galaxy cluster is already four and a half billion light-years away. So it technically should be redshifted. This should be a lot more red than it looks,” DePasquale said.
“The story with Webb is that it can see the distant, distant galaxies, whereas Hubble gets to a point it can no longer see them because they have redshifted into infrared light,” he said.
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