Yes, NASA Did Manipulate The Webb Telescope’s First Color Images Last Week—But Don’t Call Them ‘Fake’
Pretty cool, huh? But were they real?
Of course they were real!
Were they exactly as Webb captured them in one single image, like you taking a photo with your phone?
No—not at all.
Webb is designed to be sensitive to light that we cannot see. It also has four science instruments and seventeen modes.
“When you get the data down, they they don’t look anything like a beautiful color image,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at STScI, who heads-up a team of 30 expert image manipulators. “They don’t hardly look like anything at all [and] it’s only if you know what to look for that you can appreciate them.”
Webb’s engineers had to heavily manipulate the images we saw a lot before they were published, and for some pretty simple and common-sense reasons.
So what’s going on?
This is not just snapping a picture on a phone.
Planning the images
First comes the shot selection. NASA was looking for objects that would produce a nice frame, have structure and make use of color—while also highlighting science.
Webb cannot see every part of the sky at any given time. So given that the launch of the telescope was delayed multiple times, there was no way that engineers could meticulously plan the first images until Webb went to skywards last December.
When it did so, engineers had a list of about 70 targets, which were selected to demonstrate the breadth of science web was capable of, and which could herald spectacular colour images.
“Once we knew when we would be able to take the data, we could go down that list and pick the highest prioritized targets that were visible at that time,” said Pontoppidan. “The images were planned for a long time [and] there's been a lot of work going into stimulating what the observations would look like so that everything could be configured just right.