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I love webb, but there is something hauntingly beautiful about these photographs from voyager / juno and other flyby missions. It _feels_ close, yet alarmingly

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.

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.