Space travel: This is how the fascinating images are created with the James Webb telescope

The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope hit the media last week. These showed stars and galaxies that could provide scientists with further information about the universe and its assumed formation about 13.8 billion years ago. Image processor Joe DePasquale, who is involved in the space project, has now explained to Axios how JWST develops these images.

Dark images with infrared light are not visible to the human eye

The James Webb Space Telescope views the Universe via infrared, which helps it process details of star formation and the faint light from the first galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago. Light is captured in wavelengths that the human eye cannot perceive. “Biologically, we just don’t have the ability — even if we were to hover next to these objects — to see them the way Hubble or Webb can see them,” says Joe DePasquale.

He goes on to explain that images taken by the JWST and beamed back to Earth look essentially black. Each pixel in an image has over 65,000 different shades of gray. Also, the universe is said to be very dark, so the interesting parts of a JWST image should be buried in its darkest regions.

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The task of the image processing team is then to brighten the darkest parts of the resulting image to bring out the details hidden in the pixels, without oversaturating the brightest areas of the image, which could be galactic nuclei or bright stars . The JWST is said to operate with such sensitivity that it can distinguish different infrared bands – just as human eyes can with optical light, resulting in the separation of colors.

The image processors at JWST can thus sort infrared light with long and short wavelengths and thus filter the image by different colors. ‘If you had infrared eyes sensitive to this light, you could see that,’ commented JWST project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan.

Source: via axios