20 ms·

What is Webb observing now?

368 points by janandonly 3y ago

regularfry 3y ago
If I zoom in, I see a reddish mottled pattern. Is that sensor noise, background radiation, or something else? Similarly, if I zoom out to 30.39 angular degrees, there's a similar-ish green mottled pattern that's very prominent. What's that? It looks like it's got linear features, which might be a stitching artefact of some sort, maybe?
- regularfry 3y ago
  This was the specific target at the time: https://spacetelescopelive.org/webb?obsId=01HTJT20C0STKNZ01KQYGEKBQ1 https://spacetelescopelive.org/webb?obsId=01HTJT20C0STKNZ01K...
- jofer 3y ago
  I'm not an astronomer, but I believe the "mottled red" features are distant objects that are redshifted. Note that they're almost all red no matter where you zoom in. That's the evidence that space is expanding in a nutshell.
  - privong 3y ago
    Distant objects do tend to look redder because of redshift, but the mottled pattern is a bit too regular to all be distant galaxies. It's more likely to be the noise in the data used for the red channel (likely the infrared Ks filter).
- privong 3y ago
  > If I zoom in, I see a reddish mottled pattern. Is that sensor noise, background radiation, or something else? I assume you mean the pattern that is distributed across the general image? That's noise in one of the three filter images used to make the color image. 2MASS imaged in the J, H, and Ks filters (likely mapped to blue, green, and red, respectively). It could be that the choice of stretch is emphasizing the noise in that filter a bit more. Alternately, the noise there could be a bit higher (at the long wavelength end, Ks starts to cover a part of the spectrum where there's appreciable emission from a ~300K blackbody, i.e., the general temperature of things Earth). > Similarly, if I zoom out to 30.39 angular degrees, there's a similar-ish green mottled pattern that's very prominent. What's that? It looks like it's got linear features, which might be a stitching artefact of some sort, maybe? Perhaps regions where the image was made using only the H band from the 2MASS survey?
gigatexal 3y ago
This is so very, very cool. I did hear some horrible news. Seems the funding for the next-gen (or even current maintainence of) Chandra-X ray observatory (space based telescope) won't get approved which is a huge shame. Maybe politicians could be persuaded by sites like these and greater awareness campaigns to not lose such a worthwhile instrument for science. And if it does is there an international equivalent maybe via the ESA or another that could make up for it or should the science world suffer because of the lack of US funding?
- system2 3y ago
  Politics and religion slowed down our space exploration by many thousands of years.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    I... Don't think so? Soviet Union as a materially poor country will not pour so much money into exploring space if it wasn't so important politically at the moment. The US was much wealthier, but also skipped space spendings the first moment politics no longer persuaded space exploration. Stuff like GPS and especially Glonass were also borne out of political goals. Same for ISS. If anything, the only way we may get to explore solar system is via political push.
    - Fremololni 3y ago
      NASA asks for money and politicians say no.
      - hunter-gatherer 3y ago
        NASA often asks for money and politicians say yes.
        Fremololni 3y ago
        Yes but that's not the criticism. It's the no saying
sneela 3y ago
Zooming out, panning around, and seeing the milky is... jaw dropping in a way. I know it's silly because we've seen SO many photos of the universe, but I still get the goosebumps every time I think about it. And the detail too! You can really zoom in. I tried to look for the moon, but it looks like it's not possible: https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rwynmt/could_the_james_webb_space_telescope_see_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rwynmt/could_th...
andrewstuart 3y ago
So.... pretty much a game of Star Raiders? https://ia902205.us.archive.org/15/items/a8b_Star_Raiders_1979_Atari_US_k_file/screenshot_03.jpg https://ia902205.us.archive.org/15/items/a8b_Star_Raiders_19...
safety1st 3y ago
Quite fun. I was thinking it would be awesome to have whatever Webb is currently looking at as my desktop background or a website background or something. Glancing through the FF inspector it doesn't look like there is a single image which represents that, though. It looks like a piece of JS called Aladin is stitching together a bunch of 512x512 images. Anybody know more about this?
- andai 3y ago
  I think most operating systems let you set a web page as your wallpaper... or they used to, at least. Not sure if there's a way to make this site load full screen by default though. And I don't know if the "desktop browser" can run user-scripts...
  - _joel 3y ago
    Heh, brought back memories of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop
- alexpotato 3y ago
  The other option is to use Chrome/Firefox headless mode and take a screen shot. You can probably then crop it automagically with some command line image tool to get you an image for your desktop.
- apawloski 3y ago
  Not sure about JWST, but for Earth-observing satellite data it's common to store data in formats that support tiling and ranged reads so that clients are only loading the parts of the dataset relevant to current view. My guess is something similar is happening here on the other side of that library.
alex_suzuki 3y ago
This is amazing. Anyone know if they have some kind of API access for the feed?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  There is https://github.com/avatsaev/webb-tracker-api https://github.com/avatsaev/webb-tracker-api which says it gets its info from https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.htm...; not sure if it's a content scraper or if there's an API there as well.
syadegari 3y ago
+1!! This may sound weird, but I can use this as a mood booster when life gets tough. Side note: I might be biased because I also find it useful to think about the vastness space to trick my brain falling asleep (I watch a lot of video astronomy videos).
- RajT88 3y ago
  “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” Per wikipedia: The observable universe contains as many as an estimated 2 trillion galaxies and, overall, as many as an estimated 10^24 stars – more stars (and earth-like planets) than all the grains of beach sand on planet Earth. The estimated total number of stars in an inflationary universe (observed and unobserved) is 10^100. IMO, a trillion is a number the human mind has trouble conceiving. We understand it only in an abstract sense - if you try to imagine what a trillion stars looks like in front of you, or a billion, or a million even, most likely you're imagining at best tens of thousands. 10^24 is orders of magnitude more abstract: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
  - bobbob1921 3y ago
    I have always found the analogy all the grains of sand on the beaches of earth to be something that helps accurately convey large numbers to myself and others. Somethings I’ve always wondered about this analogy: 1 – at what depth are they referring to, i.e. if you’re at a beach and dig down two feet you’re still Coming in contact with sand (and grains of sand). Do these count also? 2 – if you wade out into the ocean and go underwater, there are also more grains of sand under the water (are these included?). (what about all the grains of sand on the various vast deserts around earth?) For number two I would assume NO as the analogy says all the grains of sand on the earths beaches a beach.
    - jajko 3y ago
      As per parents numbers, its way way more than all the grains of sand anywhere on Earth.
syadegari 3y ago
Does someone know why the bright stars in the image do not show the hexagonal pattern that is present in published images of Webb?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I presume it's not a live view of what Webb is seeing but existing images / visualisations from other sources pointing in the same direction Webb is right now.
- delecti 3y ago
  My understanding is that the 6-pointed spike diffraction pattern only occurs on stars, and that the bright points without them are galaxies.
- privong 3y ago
  The background image is not data from Webb; it is a near-infrared image from the 2 Micron All-sky Survey (2MASS). See @skybrian's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769
chilling 3y ago
What a time to be alive!
designium 3y ago
Indeed very cool I didn't know that you could watch them live!
- croes 3y ago
  You can't https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769
lnauta 3y ago
This is really cool. And having that skymap makes it so much better!
casiejudi 3y ago
[flagged]
7373737373 3y ago
I wish there was such an "attention map" for more telescopes
skybrian 3y ago
I’m getting the impression that some people don’t know what they’re looking at. It says “Background: Two Micron All Sky Survey” which you can read about here [1]. This is not a live image. It’s just showing you where it’s pointing, which isn’t so meaningful for most of us. (It’s random-looking stars.) You can read interesting details about the current observation at the top, though. Currently: * A census of high-redshift kpc-scale dual quasars * A 49 minute, 55 second observation. There’s a link to the research proposal [2] Apparently it’s a six-month survey of dual (possibly lensed) quasars. Gravitational lensing can cause magnification, distortion, and duplication of the image of whatever is behind it, so this is a way to learn more about very distant (early) quasars. A quasar is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, so this seems like a way to take lensed pictures of a lot of early galaxies? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS [2] https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/program-information?id=4204 https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/program-informa...
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Webb won't ever provide a recent view since the images belong to the research group and are only made public when the results are released. Also, Webb can't provide a video feed since it is taking long exposures, and probably only sends results back to Earth when image is finished. The images are in the infrared and only look good when processed.
  - basil-rash 3y ago
    > only look good when processed Ehh. I personally can’t stand all the post processing folks love to make their results look “magazine ready”. I think the most minimal transformation possible to map the data into 0xRRGGBB would look the best, ideally with a simple standardized algorithm that doesn’t allow for any “artistic license”.
    - _trampeltier 3y ago
      IR pictures would be not RGB, just black/white (or whatever palette you like). But yes, it would be possible. For ex. from Flir Thermal cameras, you also can output the image just as spreadsheet. You can even choose the values as temperature (which is calculated) or just as energy (what the sensor gets).
VyseofArcadia 3y ago
I know desktop widgets have been out of fashion for a while, but a desktop widget of this would be great. Or even just a simple XCoffee-style application.
sentrysapper 3y ago
This is amazing. I navigated back to some previous targets and saw what looks like some kind of astronomical event, blue clusters lining up to some kind of explosion. Can anyone explain what Webb is seeing to the left of its target here? https://spacetelescopelive.org/webb?obsId=01HTJT20DRPEDT9DQNK5H471R0 https://spacetelescopelive.org/webb?obsId=01HTJT20DRPEDT9DQN...
Tempest1981 3y ago
Hmmm, unfortunate timing: "Planned Outage - On Friday, April 12th starting at noon through Sunday, April 14th, Space Telescope Live may be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience."
- tedk-42 3y ago
  Really silly to post it and everyone to upvote hahaha

368 points by janandonly 3y ago

If I zoom in, I see a reddish mottled pattern. Is that sensor noise, background radiation, or something else? Similarly, if I zoom out to 30.39 angular degrees, there's a similar-ish green mottled pattern that's very prominent. What's that? It looks like it's got linear features, which might be a stitching artefact of some sort, maybe?

regularfry 3y ago
This was the specific target at the time: https://spacetelescopelive.org/webb?obsId=01HTJT20C0STKNZ01KQYGEKBQ1 https://spacetelescopelive.org/webb?obsId=01HTJT20C0STKNZ01K...
jofer 3y ago
I'm not an astronomer, but I believe the "mottled red" features are distant objects that are redshifted. Note that they're almost all red no matter where you zoom in. That's the evidence that space is expanding in a nutshell.
- privong 3y ago
  Distant objects do tend to look redder because of redshift, but the mottled pattern is a bit too regular to all be distant galaxies. It's more likely to be the noise in the data used for the red channel (likely the infrared Ks filter).
privong 3y ago
> If I zoom in, I see a reddish mottled pattern. Is that sensor noise, background radiation, or something else? I assume you mean the pattern that is distributed across the general image? That's noise in one of the three filter images used to make the color image. 2MASS imaged in the J, H, and Ks filters (likely mapped to blue, green, and red, respectively). It could be that the choice of stretch is emphasizing the noise in that filter a bit more. Alternately, the noise there could be a bit higher (at the long wavelength end, Ks starts to cover a part of the spectrum where there's appreciable emission from a ~300K blackbody, i.e., the general temperature of things Earth). > Similarly, if I zoom out to 30.39 angular degrees, there's a similar-ish green mottled pattern that's very prominent. What's that? It looks like it's got linear features, which might be a stitching artefact of some sort, maybe? Perhaps regions where the image was made using only the H band from the 2MASS survey?

gigatexal 3y ago

This is so very, very cool. I did hear some horrible news. Seems the funding for the next-gen (or even current maintainence of) Chandra-X ray observatory (space based telescope) won't get approved which is a huge shame. Maybe politicians could be persuaded by sites like these and greater awareness campaigns to not lose such a worthwhile instrument for science. And if it does is there an international equivalent maybe via the ESA or another that could make up for it or should the science world suffer because of the lack of US funding?

system2 3y ago
Politics and religion slowed down our space exploration by many thousands of years.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  I... Don't think so? Soviet Union as a materially poor country will not pour so much money into exploring space if it wasn't so important politically at the moment. The US was much wealthier, but also skipped space spendings the first moment politics no longer persuaded space exploration. Stuff like GPS and especially Glonass were also borne out of political goals. Same for ISS. If anything, the only way we may get to explore solar system is via political push.
  - Fremololni 3y ago
    NASA asks for money and politicians say no.
    - hunter-gatherer 3y ago
      NASA often asks for money and politicians say yes.
      - Fremololni 3y ago
        Yes but that's not the criticism. It's the no saying

sneela 3y ago

Zooming out, panning around, and seeing the milky is... jaw dropping in a way. I know it's silly because we've seen SO many photos of the universe, but I still get the goosebumps every time I think about it. And the detail too! You can really zoom in. I tried to look for the moon, but it looks like it's not possible: https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rwynmt/could_the_james_webb_space_telescope_see_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rwynmt/could_th...

andrewstuart 3y ago

So.... pretty much a game of Star Raiders? https://ia902205.us.archive.org/15/items/a8b_Star_Raiders_1979_Atari_US_k_file/screenshot_03.jpg https://ia902205.us.archive.org/15/items/a8b_Star_Raiders_19...

safety1st 3y ago

Quite fun. I was thinking it would be awesome to have whatever Webb is currently looking at as my desktop background or a website background or something. Glancing through the FF inspector it doesn't look like there is a single image which represents that, though. It looks like a piece of JS called Aladin is stitching together a bunch of 512x512 images. Anybody know more about this?

andai 3y ago
I think most operating systems let you set a web page as your wallpaper... or they used to, at least. Not sure if there's a way to make this site load full screen by default though. And I don't know if the "desktop browser" can run user-scripts...
- _joel 3y ago
  Heh, brought back memories of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop
alexpotato 3y ago
The other option is to use Chrome/Firefox headless mode and take a screen shot. You can probably then crop it automagically with some command line image tool to get you an image for your desktop.
apawloski 3y ago
Not sure about JWST, but for Earth-observing satellite data it's common to store data in formats that support tiling and ranged reads so that clients are only loading the parts of the dataset relevant to current view. My guess is something similar is happening here on the other side of that library.

alex_suzuki 3y ago

This is amazing. Anyone know if they have some kind of API access for the feed?

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
There is https://github.com/avatsaev/webb-tracker-api https://github.com/avatsaev/webb-tracker-api which says it gets its info from https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.htm...; not sure if it's a content scraper or if there's an API there as well.

syadegari 3y ago

+1!! This may sound weird, but I can use this as a mood booster when life gets tough. Side note: I might be biased because I also find it useful to think about the vastness space to trick my brain falling asleep (I watch a lot of video astronomy videos).

RajT88 3y ago
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” Per wikipedia: The observable universe contains as many as an estimated 2 trillion galaxies and, overall, as many as an estimated 10^24 stars – more stars (and earth-like planets) than all the grains of beach sand on planet Earth. The estimated total number of stars in an inflationary universe (observed and unobserved) is 10^100. IMO, a trillion is a number the human mind has trouble conceiving. We understand it only in an abstract sense - if you try to imagine what a trillion stars looks like in front of you, or a billion, or a million even, most likely you're imagining at best tens of thousands. 10^24 is orders of magnitude more abstract: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
- bobbob1921 3y ago
  I have always found the analogy all the grains of sand on the beaches of earth to be something that helps accurately convey large numbers to myself and others. Somethings I’ve always wondered about this analogy: 1 – at what depth are they referring to, i.e. if you’re at a beach and dig down two feet you’re still Coming in contact with sand (and grains of sand). Do these count also? 2 – if you wade out into the ocean and go underwater, there are also more grains of sand under the water (are these included?). (what about all the grains of sand on the various vast deserts around earth?) For number two I would assume NO as the analogy says all the grains of sand on the earths beaches a beach.
  - jajko 3y ago
    As per parents numbers, its way way more than all the grains of sand anywhere on Earth.

syadegari 3y ago

Does someone know why the bright stars in the image do not show the hexagonal pattern that is present in published images of Webb?

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I presume it's not a live view of what Webb is seeing but existing images / visualisations from other sources pointing in the same direction Webb is right now.
delecti 3y ago
My understanding is that the 6-pointed spike diffraction pattern only occurs on stars, and that the bright points without them are galaxies.
privong 3y ago
The background image is not data from Webb; it is a near-infrared image from the 2 Micron All-sky Survey (2MASS). See @skybrian's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769

chilling 3y ago

What a time to be alive!

designium 3y ago

Indeed very cool I didn't know that you could watch them live!

croes 3y ago
You can't https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013769

lnauta 3y ago

This is really cool. And having that skymap makes it so much better!

casiejudi 3y ago

[flagged]

7373737373 3y ago

I wish there was such an "attention map" for more telescopes

skybrian 3y ago

I’m getting the impression that some people don’t know what they’re looking at. It says “Background: Two Micron All Sky Survey” which you can read about here [1]. This is not a live image. It’s just showing you where it’s pointing, which isn’t so meaningful for most of us. (It’s random-looking stars.) You can read interesting details about the current observation at the top, though. Currently: * A census of high-redshift kpc-scale dual quasars * A 49 minute, 55 second observation. There’s a link to the research proposal [2] Apparently it’s a six-month survey of dual (possibly lensed) quasars. Gravitational lensing can cause magnification, distortion, and duplication of the image of whatever is behind it, so this is a way to learn more about very distant (early) quasars. A quasar is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, so this seems like a way to take lensed pictures of a lot of early galaxies? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS [2] https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/program-information?id=4204 https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/program-informa...

ianburrell 3y ago
Webb won't ever provide a recent view since the images belong to the research group and are only made public when the results are released. Also, Webb can't provide a video feed since it is taking long exposures, and probably only sends results back to Earth when image is finished. The images are in the infrared and only look good when processed.
- basil-rash 3y ago
  > only look good when processed Ehh. I personally can’t stand all the post processing folks love to make their results look “magazine ready”. I think the most minimal transformation possible to map the data into 0xRRGGBB would look the best, ideally with a simple standardized algorithm that doesn’t allow for any “artistic license”.
  - _trampeltier 3y ago
    IR pictures would be not RGB, just black/white (or whatever palette you like). But yes, it would be possible. For ex. from Flir Thermal cameras, you also can output the image just as spreadsheet. You can even choose the values as temperature (which is calculated) or just as energy (what the sensor gets).

VyseofArcadia 3y ago

I know desktop widgets have been out of fashion for a while, but a desktop widget of this would be great. Or even just a simple XCoffee-style application.

sentrysapper 3y ago

This is amazing. I navigated back to some previous targets and saw what looks like some kind of astronomical event, blue clusters lining up to some kind of explosion. Can anyone explain what Webb is seeing to the left of its target here? https://spacetelescopelive.org/webb?obsId=01HTJT20DRPEDT9DQNK5H471R0 https://spacetelescopelive.org/webb?obsId=01HTJT20DRPEDT9DQN...

Tempest1981 3y ago

Hmmm, unfortunate timing: "Planned Outage - On Friday, April 12th starting at noon through Sunday, April 14th, Space Telescope Live may be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience."

tedk-42 3y ago
Really silly to post it and everyone to upvote hahaha