James Webb Image Colourisation

[glend (Glen)]

And interesting article on how operators of the JW telescope, approach colourisation. Different to Hubble as it is infra-red.
Note that they point out that this is I interpreted colour bearing no relationship to actual, as spectrum frequency is not normally visible.

https://gizmodo.com/webb-space-teles...ion-1849320633

[JA]

Hi Glen,

Thanks for the read. I would only add that whilst the JWST mostly observes in InfraRed, according to the
JWST Technical Info, there is also some response down in to the visible light range of 0.6µm (600nm), covering deep orange/red/Ha, depending on which instrument it is using. As a result it doesn't have to be all false colour, unless they wish it to be.

Best
JA

[ChrisD (Chris)]

Interesting article. Actually anything about the JWST is interesting I think.

Who hasn't had that question when you show a non-astronomer your latest astrophoto. The "so is that what it would look like if I were in space?" question.

Yeah, sure, if your eyes had a 203mm iris and could form a image over 2 hours, why not.

[The_bluester (Paul)]

I have not had a chance to delve in to it but my understanding is that a lot of the images could actually approach true colour.

By my understanding, James Webb goes in to the infra red as it is seeking to observe objects at such great distances that they are all hugely red shifted, so much so that what would be visible wavelengths for objects not moving away as fast are shifted into the infra red. If that is the case, translate those wavelengths up into shorter wavelengths and you would see something like true colour, from the frame of reference of the target.

Kind of like FM radio, where voice frequencies are used to modulate a carrier wave of a far higher frequency. the "Voice" frequencies are still there, just translated up into the mhz range and you can recover them again as they were. I know that analogy only goes so far as you don't just mix the received Mhz band signal with the carrier frequency to get the "signal" back, but functionally that is about what happens in FM. You could consider it to be massively blue shifted audio.