I remember back when attending an Adam Block processing class at Mount Lemmon, AZ, he discussed the techniques for removing the diffraction spikes and said that while it wasn't hard it did manipulate the data enough that the image could no longer be used for science data work. There will be no way science would toss data out and use cloning to fix diffraction spikes. We study the data, build the 3D models of molecules and proteins, and use those as a visual teaching tool to colleagues and the general public alike.Įxactly, Hubble (and now Webb) telescopes are for doing science, the pretty pictures are just a side line. Scientists do not use these released images for research, they use the raw data available.Įdit: to make an example more clearly in my field of chemistry and biochemistry, we do not study the models of molecular interactions that we build. I think they are using diffraction spikes to make it more obvious what is a star in the milky way and what is a galaxy. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced they aren't doing that already. If the team decided to release images without diffraction spikes that's ok. And the artistic image is shown to the public. The scientific data is still there, unaltered. I am just saying that astronomical images are edited for artistic purposes, and not for scientific purposes. I am NOT saying some image needs to meet my form of purity whatever that means. Listen I'm a biochemist and amateur astrophotopher, huge space nerd and I volunteer at an observatory on the weekends. But it would not detract scientifically to remove them. It's true branding, it's really there in the data. But let's not pretend the diffraction spikes that they decide to keep in the fully processed images are anything more than branding. These images released do not detract from the scientific data, because the raw data is available too. The webb takes that even further, because most of what it observes is not visible to the eye at all. But the Hubble palette is not a full visible spectrum, it is three very narrow bands of the visible spectrum mapped to a normal RGB to make a picture that makes sense to the human eye. These three emission wavelengths are re-mapped to our common RGB that our eye is used to seeing, to make pretty pictures. Which is narrow-band data taken from "SHO" or sulfer, hydrogen, oxygen emission wavelengths which pick up common gas elements in the universe. The precedent that Hubble set was to use the so-called Hubble palette. If these images were unaltered data, we would see a red smudge and the rest of the data would be invisible to the human eye, being in the infrared. The James Webb can't record any wavelengths less than about 650nm, which is deep in the red already. That data is available to scientists and the rest of the world as public information. These images they have released are not the unaltered data. So these images that are released by NASA are really only to get the public excited, and draw public support.
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