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Are the rings only that prominent because of infrared? Would they look like that in visible light if you were close enough? Those look like they could compete w

Are the rings only that prominent because of infrared? Would they look like that in visible light if you were close enough? Those look like they could compete with Saturn.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Nothing like this. Voyager saw this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/40079347843 https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/40079347843 Even that's better than we'd see with our eyes: > The rings here are significantly fainter relative to Uranus than pictured here; the charcoal black rings would be near the limits of naked eye visibility to a human observer.
- vault 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ykonstant 3y ago
    Ooh, nice addition to my ublock list.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  I love webb, but there is something hauntingly beautiful about these photographs from voyager / juno and other flyby missions. It _feels_ close, yet alarmingly far.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    The flyby photos are cool but it’s just so much more useful to have a telescope at a controlled location able to focus on any point for any amount of time. I do hope we keep doing flybys or autonomous exploration of the planets with a video feed
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      Sure sure. Nobody is going to make mission decisions based on my artistic interpretation of the results. Aside: I think the most useful instrument for NASA's mission at the moment is a boolean "Life/no-life" indicator on each planet, moon, asteroid, etc. Not very pretty.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    Exactly! I would rather see things the way my eyes would see them up close. The Webb photo seems unrealistic and photoshopped (even though it isn't).
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    I think this is because photos from Earth are somewhat 'uniform', they're always the same angle, and because they're so far away, we basically always see only the day side from Earth, which makes them look a bit 'fake'. Meanwhile, the photos from the probes that actually went there are from more unusual angles and you can see some more amount of the night side. Similar to how images from something like the Himawari satellite (from geostationary orbit) quickly become a lot less visually interesting than photos from the ISS.
  - owenversteeg 3y ago
    I completely agree, the Voyager photographs have a certain je ne sais quoi to them that Webb never did. Of course there are differences in processing, and the visible vs infrared plays a role, but at the end of the day I think the biggest part is the various artifacts of the lens+sensor systems JWST has. This is most obvious in the lower quality images; compare JWST's Uranus and Voyager 2's Neptune for two "low-quality" images with artifacts. Or, for higher quality, Hubble vs JWST's Pillars of Creation. To me, the former could be on a poster on any kid's wall and the latter could not. That said, JWST does have some images with an ethereal quality of that bygone age of space. Its images of Jupiter's auroras and the Whirlpool Galaxy make me feel quite some things, and it did by far the best NGC 1433.
BurningFrog 3y ago
Uranus' orbit is 20x further from the Sun than Earth, which means it only gets 0.25% as much sunlight. Not sure what exactly that means for human eyesight, but it's probably less spectacular out there than we'd hope.
- kridsdale1 3y ago
  Human vision is strongly exponential in terms of brightness sensitivity. In photography we talk about “stops” which are powers of two of light intensity. Consumer digital cameras around 2005 could see maybe 9 stops for a single exposure. Now they can do maybe 10-14 (which means they’re ~30x more capable of a range of light values). Human vision can handle adapting to a much wider range because we don’t see with a single exposure. The iris adjusts, we saccade around the scene collecting data and mentally aggregating it. A good approximation is the iPhone’s panorama mode. It’s really recording video and adapting the dynamic range window as you pan, so the sun tends not to blown out the rest of the image. The main point I want to make is that outdoor sunlight on earth is indeed a million times more intense in terms of lux, lumens, candelas, or watts, than interior living (say lit by a nightlight or candle). This works out to 20 stops. - 100,000 lux outdoors on earth - 0.1 lux finding your seat in a theater So we can see already when the light is 0.0001% the power of “Earth, noon”. We could see Uranus. Sunlight on earth is extremely intense! You feel it direct on your skin like being 2 feet from a fire. It damages your cells. It evaporates the sea and propels hurricanes. I’d we hadn’t evolved to live with it, we’d find it quite intolerable.
- jl6 3y ago
  For comparison, daytime on Earth is about 100,000 lux while a typical moonlit night is 0.1 lux[0]. Uranus gets 350 lux[1], which is similar to the light level at sunrise on Earth. So quite dim but not dark. [0] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/58/1/1.31/2938119 https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/58/1/1.31/2938119 [1] https://oikofuge.com/same-sun-other-skies/ https://oikofuge.com/same-sun-other-skies/
- jetrink 3y ago
  You'd be surprised by the dynamic range of the human eye. I happen to have my camera on my desk, so I used it to take a couple measurements just now. It's a bright, sunny day. Pointed out the window[1]: 1/2000th The interior of my office[2]: 1/30th My office feels brightly lit to me, but the ambient light level is only about 1-2% of what it is outdoors. I estimate that 0.25% is roughly how bright it is indoors on an overcast day or outdoors at twilight on a clear day. It's dim, but people with unimpaired vision have no trouble seeing in that light level and the planet would still look spectacular. 1. Grass and trees with no sky in frame. 2. Shades open, light grey walls mostly. Same ISO and aperture.

Are the rings only that prominent because of infrared? Would they look like that in visible light if you were close enough? Those look like they could compete with Saturn.

ceejayoz 3y ago

Nothing like this. Voyager saw this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/40079347843 https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/40079347843 Even that's better than we'd see with our eyes: > The rings here are significantly fainter relative to Uranus than pictured here; the charcoal black rings would be near the limits of naked eye visibility to a human observer.

vault 3y ago
[flagged]
- ykonstant 3y ago
  Ooh, nice addition to my ublock list.
jvanderbot 3y ago
I love webb, but there is something hauntingly beautiful about these photographs from voyager / juno and other flyby missions. It _feels_ close, yet alarmingly far.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  The flyby photos are cool but it’s just so much more useful to have a telescope at a controlled location able to focus on any point for any amount of time. I do hope we keep doing flybys or autonomous exploration of the planets with a video feed
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Sure sure. Nobody is going to make mission decisions based on my artistic interpretation of the results. Aside: I think the most useful instrument for NASA's mission at the moment is a boolean "Life/no-life" indicator on each planet, moon, asteroid, etc. Not very pretty.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  Exactly! I would rather see things the way my eyes would see them up close. The Webb photo seems unrealistic and photoshopped (even though it isn't).
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I think this is because photos from Earth are somewhat 'uniform', they're always the same angle, and because they're so far away, we basically always see only the day side from Earth, which makes them look a bit 'fake'. Meanwhile, the photos from the probes that actually went there are from more unusual angles and you can see some more amount of the night side. Similar to how images from something like the Himawari satellite (from geostationary orbit) quickly become a lot less visually interesting than photos from the ISS.
- owenversteeg 3y ago
  I completely agree, the Voyager photographs have a certain je ne sais quoi to them that Webb never did. Of course there are differences in processing, and the visible vs infrared plays a role, but at the end of the day I think the biggest part is the various artifacts of the lens+sensor systems JWST has. This is most obvious in the lower quality images; compare JWST's Uranus and Voyager 2's Neptune for two "low-quality" images with artifacts. Or, for higher quality, Hubble vs JWST's Pillars of Creation. To me, the former could be on a poster on any kid's wall and the latter could not. That said, JWST does have some images with an ethereal quality of that bygone age of space. Its images of Jupiter's auroras and the Whirlpool Galaxy make me feel quite some things, and it did by far the best NGC 1433.

BurningFrog 3y ago

Uranus' orbit is 20x further from the Sun than Earth, which means it only gets 0.25% as much sunlight. Not sure what exactly that means for human eyesight, but it's probably less spectacular out there than we'd hope.

kridsdale1 3y ago
Human vision is strongly exponential in terms of brightness sensitivity. In photography we talk about “stops” which are powers of two of light intensity. Consumer digital cameras around 2005 could see maybe 9 stops for a single exposure. Now they can do maybe 10-14 (which means they’re ~30x more capable of a range of light values). Human vision can handle adapting to a much wider range because we don’t see with a single exposure. The iris adjusts, we saccade around the scene collecting data and mentally aggregating it. A good approximation is the iPhone’s panorama mode. It’s really recording video and adapting the dynamic range window as you pan, so the sun tends not to blown out the rest of the image. The main point I want to make is that outdoor sunlight on earth is indeed a million times more intense in terms of lux, lumens, candelas, or watts, than interior living (say lit by a nightlight or candle). This works out to 20 stops. - 100,000 lux outdoors on earth - 0.1 lux finding your seat in a theater So we can see already when the light is 0.0001% the power of “Earth, noon”. We could see Uranus. Sunlight on earth is extremely intense! You feel it direct on your skin like being 2 feet from a fire. It damages your cells. It evaporates the sea and propels hurricanes. I’d we hadn’t evolved to live with it, we’d find it quite intolerable.
jl6 3y ago
For comparison, daytime on Earth is about 100,000 lux while a typical moonlit night is 0.1 lux[0]. Uranus gets 350 lux[1], which is similar to the light level at sunrise on Earth. So quite dim but not dark. [0] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/58/1/1.31/2938119 https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/58/1/1.31/2938119 [1] https://oikofuge.com/same-sun-other-skies/ https://oikofuge.com/same-sun-other-skies/
jetrink 3y ago
You'd be surprised by the dynamic range of the human eye. I happen to have my camera on my desk, so I used it to take a couple measurements just now. It's a bright, sunny day. Pointed out the window[1]: 1/2000th The interior of my office[2]: 1/30th My office feels brightly lit to me, but the ambient light level is only about 1-2% of what it is outdoors. I estimate that 0.25% is roughly how bright it is indoors on an overcast day or outdoors at twilight on a clear day. It's dim, but people with unimpaired vision have no trouble seeing in that light level and the planet would still look spectacular. 1. Grass and trees with no sky in frame. 2. Shades open, light grey walls mostly. Same ISO and aperture.