Downvote me to hell, but as a person who has zero understanding of what differentiates Hubble from Webb, the pictures alone just aren't doing it for me. I was excited to see something completely new given 30 years and 10 billion dollars and instead I feel like I'm seeing what looks like an enterprise upgrade and feel slightly disappointed.
TBH, I don't think the photos were ever going to be that much more groundbreaking to your average person, given the fact that the angular resolution of the telescope is roughly equivalent to the Hubble.
It's got a much bigger mirror, so why is this the case? Well, it's because the Webb works primarily in the longer, infrared part of the spectrum, not the visible. Resolution is related to the diameter of the mirror and the wavelength being studied - the longer the wavelength, the bigger the mirror you need to achieve the same sharpness.
But working in the infrared part of the spectrum means that Webb can look further back into the past, because the oldest light created by the earliest galaxies has redshifted out of the visible spectrum because of the expansion of the universe. So we'll be able to collect and see much older light from much younger galaxies with Webb that Hubble literally cannot detect because of this redshift.
On top of this, infrared, being a longer wavelength than visible light, allows us to see through dust clouds more readily. Notice how many more stars are visible in the Carina Nebula comparison.
Lastly, the Webb has other instruments such as a spectrograph that allows us to determine the chemical composition of distant objects (such as planets). We can point it at an exoplanet and determine, say, if it has water in its atmosphere.
In total, it means marginally better photos for the general public, but a great deal of new data for scientists that should greatly further our understanding of the universe.
Webb isn’t optimized to produce maximally pretty pictures, because most of Webb’s groundbreaking science is not necessarily going to involve pretty pictures. For example, Webb will tell us otherwise-unknowable things about the atmospheric composition of exoplanets—but it will not produce stunning photos of them (too small and far away to look like more than a pinpoint). Webb will tell us discipline-defining things about the cosmological conditions in the very earliest years of the universe—but that doesn’t mean it can show us pictures of the earliest galaxies in the same close-up detail as it could of a nearby galaxy. The latter image, while more breathtaking for us laypeople, would not tell us much of anything new.
With that said, NASA is not unaware of the PR value of pretty pictures (they weren’t the point of Hubble either!) and I have no doubt that we will be getting plenty of them.
It took a while even once Hubble was fixed for people to figure out the processing to extract the prettiest pictures from it.
To explain that concretely: Hubble was launched in 1990 and was fully functional once got its eyeglasses in 1993. But it wasn't until April 1995 that Jeff Hester was studying photo evaporation in the eagle nebula and motivated by studying the concentration of different molecular gasses, created a color image by mapping the narrow SII, Halpha, and OIII molecular lines filters to RGB (a false color image, called SHO or the 'Hubble pallet' by astrophotographers)-- creating the iconic "Pillars of Creation" image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation#/media/Fil... .
Hubble's large aperture and freedom from atmospheric distortion and light polution obviously contribute greatly to the image-- but much of the purely aesthetic beauty of the image, beyond the target, comes from the process and processing choices as illustrated by the many lovely images of the same object created by amateur astronomers whos processing follows in Dr. Hester's footsteps. E.g. https://www.astrobin.com/lglsd8/https://www.astrobin.com/i1wffo Today, SHO images of many targets are produced by advanced amateurs with relatively inexpensive equipment, resulting in many breathtaking images of a sort that never existed before these techniques were popularized by the Hubble telescope. (random example: https://www.astrobin.com/fzp6u2 )
By the same token the JWT likely has locked inside it a tremendous potential for images which are both intellectually and aesthetically pleasing waiting to be unlocked through the skill and practice of people working with the data and their discovery of targets best matched to the instrument and those processing techniques.
Targets which are likely to be particularly aesthetically stimulating (as opposed to only intellectually stimulating) are also only a portion of what gets studied. A differential spectral measurement showing an oxygen atmosphere won't be much to look at-- but it will have a tremendous intellectual beauty.
Maybe in the future we'll see one of the billionaire space spacefarers partner up with some amateur astrophotographers to launch some modest equipment optimized for making aesthetic images (e.g. using optical designs that are free of diffraction spikes, like refractors or SCT reflectors). Who knows-- they might also make some interesting scientific discoveries because it's hard to study the aesthetic beauty of the universe without finding intellectual beauty of vice versa.
It might also be that processing techniques from JWT NIRcam images help terrestrial astrophotographers make better images. There are some reasonably large windows of NIR spectrum that we can image from earth-- e.g. J-band from 1170nm to 1330nm has good atmospheric transmission. And there is a lot in favor for terrestrial imaging in J-band: Light pollution is much less there, wavefront distortion from seeing is reduced, scattering (which follows the inverse 4th power of wavelength) is vastly lower. As a result you can even image the stars in the daytime with J-band. The big barrier is sensors because silicon sensors are blind past about 1100nm. The sensors used by JWT's NIRcam cost about $350k each and have to run at cryogenic temperatures. But sensor technology is improving (e.g. https://www.qhyccd.com/qhy990_qhy991/ QHY990 is more like $24k), and JWT might help drive along development by finding targets and processing techniques that could also be applied on earth just as happened with hubble SHO.
Though of course the pretty pictures really help with increasing the appetite from the public for spending on projects like this.. and capturing people's imaginations is a necessary part of the long game.
I can understand this sentiment, but I'm excited by the results we won't see: chemical spectra.
Getting readings from the atmospheres of exoplanets will give us an idea of what population and percentages could harbor life. We may even get a whiff of some tell tale signs of industry, and that would change life on earth forever.
Not an expert. But we are inside a galaxy ourselves, and it's not easy to leave this place. The scenery around us gets dated really quickly once we saw it for the first time, and it will probably stay boring until we visit another part of the universe to change the view.
Based on my understanding of astronomy, the real research starts when scientists zoomed way in, thus the "enterprise upgrade" (increased resolution I assume?) is exactly what they're looking for.
Those published pictures are probably just for show (/to proof that the taxes you paid is have been used on a real project).
What you're missing is the science and all the new data we'll find with an infrared telescope, which will come down the road. Yes it takes cool pictures, but that's just a bonus. JWT's real function is to facilitate hard science.
Detecting alien life has now become reality, JWST can analyze the composition of exoplanet atmosphere. If we can detect any technosignatures, then we made the discovery of the millennia.
They didn't spend 30 years and 10B for a big jpeg don't worry
These pics are gimmicks sent to the public as a "see what we did". It's like if Armstrong personally brought you back a moon rock, you'd be like "yeah cool that's a rock" because you don't have the instruments to analyse it nor the knowledge to know what to even look for.
The TLDR is that Webb can see much further across the universe (and thus much further back in time) and at higher higher resolution than Hubble, and Webb’s primarily Infrared sensors can see through nebulae, space dust and other obstructions better. There are numerous videos on the differences, but here are some I found pretty good:
2. NASA scientist reviewing Webb’s Carina Nebula image, explaining what Webb is unveiling for the first time, and comparing to the same image from Hubble: https://youtu.be/3y6iWi95ypc&t=2m17s
What am I missing?