So last night I did the thing where I told myself I'd just check one livestream before bed and then didn't actually go to bed until almost 1am. Worth it though. NASA and the White House put out the first full-color image from the James Webb Space Telescope yesterday evening, and Ive been staring at variations of it on three different tabs since.
The image is called Webb's First Deep Field, and its a shot of a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, sitting about 4.6 billion light-years away. The cluster is so massive it bends light around it like a lens, which means the picture also catches a bunch of much fainter, much more distant galaxies behind it, some of them over 13 billion years old. Thirteen billion. I had to sit with that number for a minute. Light that left its source before the Earth existed, landing on a gold-plated mirror a million miles from here, turned into pixels I looked at on my laptop while eating leftover pad thai.
Biden did the reveal himself at a White House event, standing next to Bill Nelson from NASA, and honestly that part bugged me a little. Not because I have anything against the guy, just, I wanted the science moment to be a science moment, not a photo-op with a president standing in front of it. NASA has been perfectly capable of running its own livestreams for decades. Felt like the discovery got a little bit borrowed. The full set of images (Carina Nebula, the Southern Ring planetary nebula, the Stephan's Quintet group, and a spectrum reading from an exoplanet called WASP-96b) are apparently coming out this morning from the actual NASA broadcast, which I think is honestly the better venue for this stuff.
Anyway, once the image dropped I did what I assume half the internet did and went hunting for the full-resolution TIFF, because the compressed JPEG NASA puts on the press page always looks a little soft to me. Their image site basically fell over. I sat there for a solid ten minutes with a spinning wheel, hit refresh probably eight times, gave up, came back twenty minutes later and finally got it to load. 150-some megabytes for one image. My poor 2019 MacBook fan spun up just trying to open it in Preview at full zoom.
The comparison that actually got me wasnt the raw distance number, it was the sky patch. Somebody put out a graphic showing how much sky the image covers, and it's roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. A grain of sand. That tiny sliver of nothing, pointed at for twelve and a half hours of exposure time, and it's just packed edge to edge with thousands of galaxies. I remember being a kid and seeing the original Hubble Deep Field photo in some science magazine my dad had lying around, and it rewired something in my head about how big everything actually is. This feels like the same kind of moment, just with better hardware.
On a totally different note, in case anyone's been following the other big tech story this week: Elon Musk's lawyers sent Twitter a letter last Friday saying he's walking away from the $44 billion buyout, claiming the company hasn't given him straight answers on how many accounts are bots. Twitter's chairman came back almost immediately saying the board intends to enforce the deal and is prepared to go to court over it. I have zero read on how this actually resolves. If you'd told me back when I started this blog in 2011 that "is the richest man in the world going to be forced to buy a website" would be a real ongoing news story eleven years later, I dont think Id have believed you. Feels like it's going to drag out for months either way.
Back to Webb though, because that's the thing I actually care about today. What gets me is that this telescope has been in development since the late 90s. Ive been running this blog for almost eleven years and Webb was already old news, in the sense that it was already delayed and over budget and the subject of "will this thing ever launch" jokes, back before I wrote my first post here. It launched last December, did a nail-biting month-long unfolding sequence a million miles out, and now, six months later, this is what it's for. One photo, and it already makes the Hubble Deep Field look almost quaint by comparison. Im going to be annoying about this for a while, fair warning.