Some high def drone footage would have fit the bill for you? (FYI in case it wasn't recognized /S as your comment seems a bit silly to me in that you are dissapointed that we have a decent quality image of something ~4 LH away).
The expectations humans have on new technology ceases to amaze me especially when something is unbelievably impressive and people are like, that's all?
Nope but Uranus is a mere 2.5h light hours away and the resolution appears to be roughly the same than looking at the moon with naked eyes. So it's not totally unreasonable to have expected a slightly better image for the best telescope we have.
This being said, that image is still better than anything else we have seen from other telescopes
Distance from earth to Uranus varies between 2.6-3.2e12 m from Earth [1]. Speed of light in vacuum is 3e8 m/s, so calling the distance 3e12 to make the math easy, it's 1e4s (2 and 7/9 hours) for light to travel between earth and Uranus.
that comparison should make you appreciate the unfathomable distances between even the most local astronomical objects, not underestimate it.
The distance between continents is hard enough for the human brain to comprehend, and imagine the difficulty in trying to caputure an image with a telephoto lens of some resolvable feature in japan, from europe or america (forgetting the shape of the Earth's surface for a moment).
Of course ever graceful, nature offers us a compromise. Most astronomical object (galaxies, nebula) are very big, and very very far away. It is not resolution that makes it difficult to see them (since they span an appreciable arc-width of our sky, e.g. search pictures of the angular width of andromeda galaxy or the orion nebula compared to the moon), but how faint they are.
The photons they emit are travelling across swathes of the observable universe. They travel across scales where the presence of galaxy clusters warp the geometry of space-time, a turbulant voyage for these light rays. They travel across distances where space itself inflates like a balloon, the expanding universe sapping energy from them until they arrive in our detectors or eyeballs redshifted beyond recognision. This is why observatories and satellite-telescopes need to place a huge emphasis on scaling up mirror size to scoop up all the photons they possibly can, as opposed to strictly focusing on resolution - as an earthbound photographer might naively expect.
Now consider the nature of planets, they are not diffuse clouds of molecules or dust lanes spanning galactic widths, they are tightly bound, tangible, physical objects. Now they might be our neighbours, trapped in the same spiral around the sun's gravitational well, but that doesn't mean they're "close" in any sense that the human mind could every really fathom. If we want to resolve atmospheric or geographic (is that even the right word for other planets?) features, we need to be able to achieve precise resolutions beyond what is normally required for other types of astronomical observation. Indeed, if you've every taken a class on optics or astronomy, you might be suprised how quickly fundamental limits of resolution that arise from lights wave-like behaviour - like airy disks - begin to veil that which we wish to observe, when playing around with frequiencies and aperture widths on a "humman" scale.
I knew pretty well about the size and emptiness of space, but what blew my mind was a video where a guy, showing a ping pong ball as if it were the Sun, drove to show how far the nearest star is. Not 10 kms away, not 50 km away, nor even 500.
If the Sun were a ping pong ball, the closest star would be 1500 km away. It is utterly mind blowing expressed that way.
Indeed, our best chance to travel that enormous distance to our next door neighbour is perhaps to take our entire Earth there.
> Though the quality of the JWST and Keck images may look about the same to the untrained eye, de Pater noted that JWST has instruments that can measure aspects of Titan’s atmosphere that Keck cannot, complementing one another. In particular, JWST’s infrared spectroscopic capability allows it to pinpoint the altitudes of clouds and hazes with much better accuracy.
> “By using spectrometers on JWST together with the optical image quality with Keck, we get a really complete picture of Titan,” she said, such as the heights of clouds, the atmosphere’s optical thickness, and the elevation of haze in the atmosphere.
> In particular, at wavelengths where Earth’s atmosphere is opaque — that is, Titan cannot be seen from any Earth-based telescope — JWST can observe and provide information on the lower atmosphere and surface.
Bigger telescopes are mostly about capturing more photons to detect fainter objects. They don't really give you better resolution in most cases. Technically, a bigger telescope can give better resolution, but from the ground, the limit is usually atmospheric seeing. From orbit, it will be down to the quality of the optics, the resolution of the detector, and the precision of the tracking.
This is very much a basic misunderstanding with telescopes. Most people expect magnification. The amount of photons absorbed is something of a very esoteric concept to the uninitiated.
That's amazing! Through my 8in scope Uranus looks like a blue dot — too big to be a star, but paltry even in comparison to Mars.
Admittedly I've been having trouble reliably locating it. Currently it's near the middle of a line between the Pleiades and Jupiter. From where I am there are no naked eye visible stars in the region to help walk the scope in.
At least you can even get that. Pluto is just a dot. And to properly image Pluto, you basically need to image the area Pluto is expected over several nights, and then stack the images to see which dot is moving.
Comparing a mission to orbit and stay on mission is really unfair to one that is only whizzing by the planet. The ice bodies need their own versions of Cassini instead of just being a road side stop for souvenirs on the way to the actual destination. The plants are not the world's largest ball of twine or some other cash grab of an attraction. They should be the destination.
It's a good thing the US is no longer the only space agency sending out probes into the solar system. Sadly, the reach of the US does extend into the other agencies in a pretty influential way though
I'll be honest, it looks fake. I don't think it is fake and I'm not trying to imply that it is. The resolution is low and high at the same time. The other zoomed out pictures are better for me personally because it gives me a little more context seeing I know nothing about space.
This is so gorgeous. I didn't even know about the existence of rings on Uranus; it is so satisfying to be able to discern features like storms on such a far away planet!
My 9 year old daughter told me last week that Uranus had rings, and I told her I really didn't think so, are you thinking of Saturn? And she said nope, they both do. What a weird bit of knowledge to get wrong, even at 9, so I looked it up. She was delighted to have taught me something.
That’s crazy to hear. To me, after Saturn, Uranus is the most famous planet with rings because it’s vertical instead of horizontal. That’s the defining feature of Uranus.
For me it is precisely because I always had in mind the "featureless blue sphere" picture in mind, and never bothered to look deeper. Goes to show how important images are in the public sphere.
It's exactly why Uranus was my favorite planet growing up. It was such an outlier, which, if I dig farther into my psyche, probably aligned well with my self view as the only kid in my class who geeked out on space.
To me, after Saturn, Uranus is the most famous planet with rings because of toilet humor.
As an aside, either get or borrow a decent telescope and see the rings of Saturn and the Galilean Moons for yourself. It’s a really neat experience and gives you a direct personal shared experience with the birth of modern astronomy.
Seeing Jupiter, its Great Red Spot, and a line of dots representing 4 of its largest moons, as well as Saturn and its rings through a telescope at a backyard astronomy event when I was a kid was such a ridiculously cool experience. Granted, I was a huge space dork.
IIRC, Saturn's rings are also relatively recent feature. If you think about it, what a time to be alive! Saturn and Uranus have rings and Sun and Moon are in so precious position, that we can experience total eclipse (this won't last too long also, relative to age of Solar system).
If it makes you feel better, outer planets with all their moons will be in habitable zone for a short time when our Sun will reach red giant stage in some billions of years.
"the appalachian mountains are older than saturn’s rings. the appalachian mountains are older than dinosaurs. the appalachian mountains are older than trees. the appalachian mountains are literally older than BONES. the appalachian mountains should be regarded with pure terror."
I know at least at one point during the Cassini mission- though I confess I have not followed this in more than a decade it so I don't know if further study has refuted this idea- a popular theory for the rings was that basically Saturn was constantly forming and destroying moons into rings and back: a moon would get torn up and turned into a ring, then slowly clump back together over time and reform as a moon, then the cycle would continue.
Super glad I'm alive in the few centuries where I can see it in the night sky from the northern hemisphere. I've seen mars too, but it's always down near the horizon. Both are way brighter than any star.
Whenever my children teach me something, it makes us so happy. They, for teaching their dad. Me, for learning something from such a special little person. It’s just the best.
This is my favorite part of my day. Yesterday we were just having dinner talking about god knows what when my 9 year old drops something into convo about The Homestead Act and how many acres you could by and how they had to be developed and all these bullet points about it I haven't retained when I may have read about it so many years ago. It was delightful.
Now, there was also the part about her thinking the Mexican–American War was in 1989. Which is Taylor Swift's birthday, her favorite artist. Which is hilarious on so many levels.
They are very faint and difficult to detect. They weren't even observed directly when they were discovered. They were originally discovered when astronomers noticed that they occulted light of background stats.
That's so strange? 'Occluded' would be a suitable word for that meaning-wise though right? When did astronomy decide to use such a close sounding but different meaning word? Did occult mean what it does now when they started? Language is so strange
The sciences are full of new-latin and neo-greek formations like Biology and Astronomy. So reaching back the the original meaning of occult "to hide (from)" isn't that big a stretch. Especially when "occlude" comes from a word meaning "to shut (away)" and an eclipse isn't shutting the sun away, just hiding it. The Mahdi isn't just standing behind something, he's hidden away in another plane. That's why he's the occluded imam.
But also occlude has a chemistry meaning when one substance gets hidden inside another, so maybe it was too overloaded to be a good word for that.
I'm not sure about the history of these words, but astronomy also uses the noun form: "occultation" [1], for which there's not an obvious equivalent for "occlude."
> Did occult mean what it does now when they started?
A word can have more than one meaning. The first definition on merriam-webster.com covers the definition used in astronomy:
occult (v.): to shut off from view or exposure: cover, eclipse [2]
The adjective form might be a source of derivation for the meaning you're alluding to:
occult (adj.): (1) not revealed: secret; (2) not easily apprehended or understood: abstruse, mysterious; (3) hidden from view: concealed [2]
And finally, the paranormal meaning that people are more familiar with today:
occult (n): matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them -> used with the [2]
Again, I don't know the history of these words. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd bet that the noun form, "the occult", is derived from the adjective form since "the occult" refers to supernatural phenomena, which is naturally hidden from view, concealed, not revealed, secret, not easily apprehended or understood, etc (because it's not real).
Edit: Another guess. If you think about the history of astronomy, it was originally intertwined with religion and astrology. Perhaps these words date back to a time when "the occult" and astronomy weren't entirely separate. Anyways, I agree. Language is strange.
Actually all 4 gas giants have rings, they're just much smaller and less visible than Saturn's. Jupiter and Neptune's rings are very slight, compared to Uranus' substantial ones and of course Saturn's gaudy decoration.
My daughter said there are 5 oceans ... I said she was wrong, then we looked at a modern map. Who forgot to send out the memo about the Southern Ocean?
I don't know but if you find out could you put me on the mailing list? Or i guess i could have a child but one of those seems a lot easier.
In all honesty, is there any place where i can view the curriculum that children in my area are being taught? They don't tell us about those changes but they might put it somewhere. I, for one, think the news should do something useful and teach us the updates from time to time. Could you imagine if all that politicking was instead useful scientific information?
My kid, after watching some YouTube videos on prehistoric man, told me that the theory of the Missing Link was wrong.
I was like, “Wait, what? When did that happen?” Apparently it was disproven for decades and I never knew. I felt like the old people who held onto their old beliefs that I felt such disdain for. He also went on to tell me that the brontosaurus didn’t exist either and I had enough.
Brontosaurus is controversial! A paper in 2015 asserts that it's distinct from Apatosaurus. When I was in school it was well understood to be just another name for the apatosaurus. Some teacher claimed it was an apatosaurus with the head and tail switched. But there's been some activity in this space!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus
There is no missing link. The issue is that the theory precluded that evolution was a straight line. They have different theories now about rivers and branches of evolution and no straight line.
Plus a lot of missing link evidence was apparently made up!
What do you mean that it's a branch instead of a straight line? Then there should still be intermediate species, and the species should not suddenly make an evolutionary jump. And what missing link evidence has been made up? Never heard about that. What is there to make up about it? You can make up something that is missing, but you can't make up something that isn't missing. So then you would mean that they incorrectly said that there was a evolutionary jump between 2 species while there wasn't?
In any case, if you have any sources, would be appreciated.
So it seems that the name "missing link" has gone out of favor because it implies a linear evolution instead of branches. But in a branch you can still have missing links I would say.
So I feel the scientists just didn't like that there was a term made up for something they can't explain yet. And the various solutions to the missing link story turned out to not fit or be a hoax, so I guess that is what you mean by "has been made up".
The wiki article says at the end of the introduction:
"There is no singular missing link. The scarcity of transitional fossils can be attributed to the incompleteness of the fossil record."
So there is not a singular missing link, but there are multiple missing links! What a smart way to sweep this issue under the rug. And then we can also say that there was never any evidence for the missing link. Which funnily enough is the whole problem, that there isn't any evidence for a species before human sapiens which would explain our evolutionary connection with another primate species.
If evidence for this missing link would be found, or evidence that would make the missing link unnecessary, I think it would be big news, not go unnoticed and that we find out from our children.
I guess they want our children to think that there are not really any big issues with our current theories. Like they did with us when we were children.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish we were capable of sending manned missions to the gas giants. Uranus and Neptune are such mysterious and beautiful worlds, I'd really like to see them up close with my own eyes, however dim such an image would be.
Maybe if we make it past the ecosystem collapse, one day people will take the Grand Tour in person. (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune)
I recall from the New Horizons media blitz that noon on Pluto is roughly the brightness of dawn or dusk, so the image of these planets should be bright enough!
The Grand Tour is a hard one, and was only possible due to a convenient alignment of the planets that does not happen frequently. For example, if Jupiter is on one side of its orbit while Saturn is on the 180° opposite point of its orbit, that's a really long way to go between destinations on the tour. I think going on a Grand Tour where you had to skip one of the planets due to a misalignment would be like going to Disneyland and never seeing Mickey. Even if you saw all of the other characters, it would still feel like you missed something.
It wouldn't be too dim, your eyes have remarkable dynamic range. Brightness is experienced more like sound, with sensory capacity of many orders of magnitude, than a physical scalar sense like weight or distance.
Wikipedia says [1] the solar radiation on Uranus is 3.4-4 W/m^2. Imagine lighting up a square meter of wall with a 3W pocket inspection light, or a mood-lit room with just a few 8W bulbs. Reading might be a little bit of a strain after a while, but I think your eyes would quickly adjust.
When New Horizons was going past Pluto, Nasa put out the #PlutoTime website [2]. Pluto is about 30 AU from Earth, Uranus is about 20 AU out, so at a particular moment around twilight - when it's bright enough to walk around without artificial lighting and to take a photo - it will be as bright as it is on Uranus. The widget is dead, but it's still accessible through archive.org. Unfortunately, it's no longer accurate, it seems to be linked to the time and date when the site was archived. I'm neither a web dev nor an astronomer, but I exported the JS and it seems to provide reasonable results:
Anyone have an idea of what solar_angle should be to simulate Uranus or Neptune? Apparently, when the sun is -1.5 degrees below the horizon here, that's about right for Pluto illumination. Just reducing the angle by three from -1.5 to -0.5 changes the time by about 6 minutes of twilight...
I wouldn't mind taking a closer look, but being inside of a gas giant seems questionable given the pressure. I've heard astronomers compare the atmosphere of some gas giants to the density of a 7-11 slurpee... and that sounds terrifying.
The problem that most people aren't even aware of is that Jupiter(and maybe others? I'm actually not sure) is throwing a massive amount of radiation around - getting anywhere close to it would kill any human very quickly. It's a huge factor in any proposed missions to its moons - like, it would be awesome to explore Europa, the concept is fascinating, but its surface is deadly due to radiation coming from Jupiter.
Yeah, the radiation was partly why I wrote "capable of sending people". You'd probably need quite a few metres of water ice surrounding your livable space if you don't want to get fried.
Which makes me wonder: if a ship was covered in, say, 10 metres of ice, would the top layer get irradiated and thus need to be replaced every so often? I wonder if it was left exposed to space, would the water ice sublimate away? Then "all" you'd need to do is replace the top layer.
Humans safe behind ice while robots do the work isn't quite as romantic as The Expanse but it'll get the job done!
What is even the benefit of being physically located right next to Jupiter, if you have to stay enclosed in 10 meters of ice at all times? Sure, you have an hour lag or so to communicate from Earth, but that seems easier to solve than all the problems of shipping humans around.
The radiation doesn't come from Jupiter but from its magnetosphere. The radiation comes from belts, like Earth's Van Allen belts, but much stronger. The Galilean moons are all inside the magnetosphere and Io is in the middle of the strongest belt.
It's probably good they all got flagged otherwise this thread would be nothing but jokes. Though I kind of wish we could have kept at least one subthread alive. :P
I mean, what else is there to say about pictures of Uranus? ‘Nice planet’?
I don’t usually make jokes on HN articles, but this one I did because what else are you gonna post. The rest of the unflagged comments are posting facts about Uranus you can read on Wikipedia.
Most likely not. Other than maybe stitch several images together in post-processing. Although not sure what use video would be on JWST. It's mostly staring at distant objects where motion wouldn't be perceivable. Unless it's taking images of a planet with several orbiting moons. Even then, it would just be would a handful of frames stitched together here on earth.
No, these are targets that are planned months in advance and at relatively long exposures in order to collect enough photons to, well, actually see the thing.
You certainly wouldn't get 60FPS, that's for sure.
Uranus is on its side. The moons orbits are on their side too, and do they also rotate on their sides, all with respect to the solar plane? The dance of the Sun in the sky must be very exotic for the moon folk of that mini system.
The large moons have zero inclination with respect to Uranus’ equator but the smaller irregular moons are all over the place. Wikipedia has this nice graphic showing orbital distance (x), eccentricity (x error bar) orbit inclination (y), and moon size:
No, not really. "aligned" would suggest some kind of connection. It is very likely a complete accident. Literally.
It most likely that at some point Uranus was hit by a planet and the collision changed the spin axis. Must have been pretty early for everything else to be aligned with the new axis.
Sorry, I meant more something like "coincident" or "parallel".
Probably a stupid question but how'd it get this vantage? Isn't JWST at a LaGrange point from Earth? Wouldn't that be on the same plane? I suppose it must not be in order to have taken this image.
Maybe you're missing the 'Uranus axis of rotation is super tilted' part? Its equatorial plane (along with its rings) is not at all 'parallel' to the ecliptic, that's what the toplevel comment is pointing out.
“Near the solstice, one pole faces the Sun continuously and the other faces away, with only a narrow strip around the equator experiencing a rapid day–night cycle, with the Sun low over the horizon. On the other side of Uranus's orbit, the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness.”
Regular consumer cameras are designed to be as close as possible to what the human eye sees. They're very obviously chosen to be responsive to R, G and B. Not infrared, yellow and UVB.
An image like this is not meant to try to match the human eye.
To try to say all cameras don't match the eyes is a false equivalence. Some are purposefully trying to match, some are purposefully trying not to (like this one).
I'd argue it isn't a false equivalence. Every time someone drags that contrast and saturation slider up they're doing something that's no different than assigning RGB to sulfur II, hydrogen alpha, and oxygen III.
With my eyes, when I look at a light source I see light refractions (rays) coming from the source that people without astigmatism do not see.
I do get what you are trying to say here and I know I'm taking your argument to the extreme, but... bear in mind that even 2 randomly selected humans would see different things looking at the same object.
Even though no human can see the light that JWST is capturing doesn't mean it is not there.
The colors are false indeed (compared to what a typical human would perceive as color), but then we also would get absolutely no pictures from JWST to look at.
What a lot of nonsense. There is absolutely nothing 'misleading' about this: the general public doesn't stand a chance trying to observe Uranus with the naked eye so regardless of what you would like to see you are always going to be dependent on a telescope (which alters the perceived size), possible color filters, color shifting in case you are looking at non-visible wavelengths and so on. The JWST is so interesting especially because it can see wavelengths that we can not.
If you want to take issue with something then I'd save my anger for the cameras that no longer show you what you are looking at, not for a scientific instrument doing exactly what it is meant to do and adaptations to show the output to the general public.
Why would you get frustrated with that? It's not a bug, it's a feature. If we are only allowed to study the visible light spectrum, we would be missing out on a lot of valuable information.
Edit: and what is misleading about it? You have to understand how the image is made. But I think NASA is making that clear, even more with the article you linked. What should NASA do otherwise? Not share these images with the public? That doesn't sound like something nice and helpful.
It's the highest priority probe, but wouldn't get there until the 2050s. To borrow a thought from idlewords, we could be sending cameras to every large object in the solar system for way less than it's costing to develop the current Moon program ($93 billion through 2025).
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadThe expectations humans have on new technology ceases to amaze me especially when something is unbelievably impressive and people are like, that's all?
This being said, that image is still better than anything else we have seen from other telescopes
Distance from earth to Uranus varies between 2.6-3.2e12 m from Earth [1]. Speed of light in vacuum is 3e8 m/s, so calling the distance 3e12 to make the math easy, it's 1e4s (2 and 7/9 hours) for light to travel between earth and Uranus.
[1] https://www.space.com/18709-uranus-distance.html#:~:text=How....
The distance between continents is hard enough for the human brain to comprehend, and imagine the difficulty in trying to caputure an image with a telephoto lens of some resolvable feature in japan, from europe or america (forgetting the shape of the Earth's surface for a moment).
Of course ever graceful, nature offers us a compromise. Most astronomical object (galaxies, nebula) are very big, and very very far away. It is not resolution that makes it difficult to see them (since they span an appreciable arc-width of our sky, e.g. search pictures of the angular width of andromeda galaxy or the orion nebula compared to the moon), but how faint they are.
The photons they emit are travelling across swathes of the observable universe. They travel across scales where the presence of galaxy clusters warp the geometry of space-time, a turbulant voyage for these light rays. They travel across distances where space itself inflates like a balloon, the expanding universe sapping energy from them until they arrive in our detectors or eyeballs redshifted beyond recognision. This is why observatories and satellite-telescopes need to place a huge emphasis on scaling up mirror size to scoop up all the photons they possibly can, as opposed to strictly focusing on resolution - as an earthbound photographer might naively expect.
Now consider the nature of planets, they are not diffuse clouds of molecules or dust lanes spanning galactic widths, they are tightly bound, tangible, physical objects. Now they might be our neighbours, trapped in the same spiral around the sun's gravitational well, but that doesn't mean they're "close" in any sense that the human mind could every really fathom. If we want to resolve atmospheric or geographic (is that even the right word for other planets?) features, we need to be able to achieve precise resolutions beyond what is normally required for other types of astronomical observation. Indeed, if you've every taken a class on optics or astronomy, you might be suprised how quickly fundamental limits of resolution that arise from lights wave-like behaviour - like airy disks - begin to veil that which we wish to observe, when playing around with frequiencies and aperture widths on a "humman" scale.
If the Sun were a ping pong ball, the closest star would be 1500 km away. It is utterly mind blowing expressed that way.
Indeed, our best chance to travel that enormous distance to our next door neighbour is perhaps to take our entire Earth there.
Part of the trouble is that it’s really far away.
Keck has a 10-meter aperture and its image of Uranus looks like this: https://keckobservatory.org/keck_pictures_of_uranus_show_bes...
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/12/01/webb-space-telescope-ke...
> Though the quality of the JWST and Keck images may look about the same to the untrained eye, de Pater noted that JWST has instruments that can measure aspects of Titan’s atmosphere that Keck cannot, complementing one another. In particular, JWST’s infrared spectroscopic capability allows it to pinpoint the altitudes of clouds and hazes with much better accuracy.
> “By using spectrometers on JWST together with the optical image quality with Keck, we get a really complete picture of Titan,” she said, such as the heights of clouds, the atmosphere’s optical thickness, and the elevation of haze in the atmosphere.
> In particular, at wavelengths where Earth’s atmosphere is opaque — that is, Titan cannot be seen from any Earth-based telescope — JWST can observe and provide information on the lower atmosphere and surface.
It amazes me that we can detect any of those with telescopes so far away. Does anyone have a rough explanation for how this is possible?
Highest magnification is approximately 2x the aperture in mm, and 300x is approximately the atmospheric limit.
Admittedly I've been having trouble reliably locating it. Currently it's near the middle of a line between the Pleiades and Jupiter. From where I am there are no naked eye visible stars in the region to help walk the scope in.
A modern probe to the ice giants is long overdue. Plenty of missions were proposed over decades, but none actually made it.
As an aside, either get or borrow a decent telescope and see the rings of Saturn and the Galilean Moons for yourself. It’s a really neat experience and gives you a direct personal shared experience with the birth of modern astronomy.
The rings just conform to that axis of rotation along with moons and such.
Also, rings are thought to be relatively recent feature of Uranus (on the order of hundreds of millions of years).
https://oldgodsofappalachia.com/
It might be apocryhpal, but it's fun anyway. Especially since I grew up there.
Now, there was also the part about her thinking the Mexican–American War was in 1989. Which is Taylor Swift's birthday, her favorite artist. Which is hilarious on so many levels.
So that's what The Great War is about!
there was a president that thought we had airplanes during the revolutionary war, so hopefully the date mix up wasn't judged too harshly
Jupiter also has ring, but it is not apparent.
But also occlude has a chemistry meaning when one substance gets hidden inside another, so maybe it was too overloaded to be a good word for that.
> Did occult mean what it does now when they started?
A word can have more than one meaning. The first definition on merriam-webster.com covers the definition used in astronomy:
occult (v.): to shut off from view or exposure: cover, eclipse [2]
The adjective form might be a source of derivation for the meaning you're alluding to:
occult (adj.): (1) not revealed: secret; (2) not easily apprehended or understood: abstruse, mysterious; (3) hidden from view: concealed [2]
And finally, the paranormal meaning that people are more familiar with today:
occult (n): matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them -> used with the [2]
Again, I don't know the history of these words. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd bet that the noun form, "the occult", is derived from the adjective form since "the occult" refers to supernatural phenomena, which is naturally hidden from view, concealed, not revealed, secret, not easily apprehended or understood, etc (because it's not real).
Edit: Another guess. If you think about the history of astronomy, it was originally intertwined with religion and astrology. Perhaps these words date back to a time when "the occult" and astronomy weren't entirely separate. Anyways, I agree. Language is strange.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occultation
[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/occult
As distinct from non-occult blood, which is probably just from asteroids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_occult_blood
In all honesty, is there any place where i can view the curriculum that children in my area are being taught? They don't tell us about those changes but they might put it somewhere. I, for one, think the news should do something useful and teach us the updates from time to time. Could you imagine if all that politicking was instead useful scientific information?
I was like, “Wait, what? When did that happen?” Apparently it was disproven for decades and I never knew. I felt like the old people who held onto their old beliefs that I felt such disdain for. He also went on to tell me that the brontosaurus didn’t exist either and I had enough.
Plus a lot of missing link evidence was apparently made up!
In any case, if you have any sources, would be appreciated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_link_(human_evolutio...
So it seems that the name "missing link" has gone out of favor because it implies a linear evolution instead of branches. But in a branch you can still have missing links I would say.
So I feel the scientists just didn't like that there was a term made up for something they can't explain yet. And the various solutions to the missing link story turned out to not fit or be a hoax, so I guess that is what you mean by "has been made up".
The wiki article says at the end of the introduction:
"There is no singular missing link. The scarcity of transitional fossils can be attributed to the incompleteness of the fossil record."
So there is not a singular missing link, but there are multiple missing links! What a smart way to sweep this issue under the rug. And then we can also say that there was never any evidence for the missing link. Which funnily enough is the whole problem, that there isn't any evidence for a species before human sapiens which would explain our evolutionary connection with another primate species.
If evidence for this missing link would be found, or evidence that would make the missing link unnecessary, I think it would be big news, not go unnoticed and that we find out from our children.
I guess they want our children to think that there are not really any big issues with our current theories. Like they did with us when we were children.
In all seriousness, it's really quite interesting to see what has changed in 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_system#Ring_systems_of_pl...
Voyager saw this: 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure what exactly that means for human eyesight, but it's probably less spectacular out there than we'd hope.
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.
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
[1] https://oikofuge.com/same-sun-other-skies/
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.
Maybe if we make it past the ecosystem collapse, one day people will take the Grand Tour in person. (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune)
That is, how it usually is ..
Wikipedia says [1] the solar radiation on Uranus is 3.4-4 W/m^2. Imagine lighting up a square meter of wall with a 3W pocket inspection light, or a mood-lit room with just a few 8W bulbs. Reading might be a little bit of a strain after a while, but I think your eyes would quickly adjust.
When New Horizons was going past Pluto, Nasa put out the #PlutoTime website [2]. Pluto is about 30 AU from Earth, Uranus is about 20 AU out, so at a particular moment around twilight - when it's bright enough to walk around without artificial lighting and to take a photo - it will be as bright as it is on Uranus. The widget is dead, but it's still accessible through archive.org. Unfortunately, it's no longer accurate, it seems to be linked to the time and date when the site was archived. I'm neither a web dev nor an astronomer, but I exported the JS and it seems to provide reasonable results:
https://jsfiddle.net/9btumsj6/
Anyone have an idea of what solar_angle should be to simulate Uranus or Neptune? Apparently, when the sun is -1.5 degrees below the horizon here, that's about right for Pluto illumination. Just reducing the angle by three from -1.5 to -0.5 changes the time by about 6 minutes of twilight...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Sola...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150827083531/http://solarsyste...
Which makes me wonder: if a ship was covered in, say, 10 metres of ice, would the top layer get irradiated and thus need to be replaced every so often? I wonder if it was left exposed to space, would the water ice sublimate away? Then "all" you'd need to do is replace the top layer.
Humans safe behind ice while robots do the work isn't quite as romantic as The Expanse but it'll get the job done!
I don't think it's happenstance that the title on HN is not the same as the title on the original site.
I don’t usually make jokes on HN articles, but this one I did because what else are you gonna post. The rest of the unflagged comments are posting facts about Uranus you can read on Wikipedia.
https://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm
"Nombas doesn't exist any more. All the good stuff was sold to Openwave, then sold to someone else, then sold to someone else, then I lost track."
You certainly wouldn't get 60FPS, that's for sure.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/TheIrreg...
The only thing missing from the graphic is each moons axial tilt with respect to either its orbit or the rest of the solar system.
It most likely that at some point Uranus was hit by a planet and the collision changed the spin axis. Must have been pretty early for everything else to be aligned with the new axis.
Probably a stupid question but how'd it get this vantage? Isn't JWST at a LaGrange point from Earth? Wouldn't that be on the same plane? I suppose it must not be in order to have taken this image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus#Axial_tilt
“Near the solstice, one pole faces the Sun continuously and the other faces away, with only a narrow strip around the equator experiencing a rapid day–night cycle, with the Sun low over the horizon. On the other side of Uranus's orbit, the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness.”
Very different from Earth! Wow.
Anyone else get frustrated with the accepted practice in astronomy to (a) alter colors and (b) show the non-visible light spectrum.
Because it results in radically different images from what we can see with our human eye and its hugely misleading to the general public.
NASA has a whole article on this subject; it’s a great read.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/science-behi...
Is setting an ISO radically changing things?
Is setting an exposure time radically changing things?
Is having an RGGB bayer pattern radically changing things?
Is having only a 91% quantum efficiency sensor radically changing things?
The questions keep going, I could ask about hot pixel removal, denoise, contrast and saturation, wavelength response curves.
Cameras aren't eyes.
Photos aren't biochemical reactions.
Regular consumer cameras are designed to be as close as possible to what the human eye sees. They're very obviously chosen to be responsive to R, G and B. Not infrared, yellow and UVB.
An image like this is not meant to try to match the human eye.
To try to say all cameras don't match the eyes is a false equivalence. Some are purposefully trying to match, some are purposefully trying not to (like this one).
It's all false color to make something look good.
Cameras are still designed to try to be able to match what the human eye perceives, regardless of what you edit afterwards.
An infrared telescope is not. Totally and utterly different. They're not the same.
I do get what you are trying to say here and I know I'm taking your argument to the extreme, but... bear in mind that even 2 randomly selected humans would see different things looking at the same object.
Even though no human can see the light that JWST is capturing doesn't mean it is not there. The colors are false indeed (compared to what a typical human would perceive as color), but then we also would get absolutely no pictures from JWST to look at.
Good! That's why we have spent $10B on it!
If you want to take issue with something then I'd save my anger for the cameras that no longer show you what you are looking at, not for a scientific instrument doing exactly what it is meant to do and adaptations to show the output to the general public.
Edit: and what is misleading about it? You have to understand how the image is made. But I think NASA is making that clear, even more with the article you linked. What should NASA do otherwise? Not share these images with the public? That doesn't sound like something nice and helpful.
I really hope we get a better look at the moons of Neptune and Uranus sooner than later. They seem to have lots of interesting history.
It's the highest priority probe, but wouldn't get there until the 2050s. To borrow a thought from idlewords, we could be sending cameras to every large object in the solar system for way less than it's costing to develop the current Moon program ($93 billion through 2025).
Gorgeous images tho, everything seemed perfectly angled for a glamour shot.
are those light rings portrayed this way because its debris orbiting at a very long exposure ?