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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

The difference is in a) the details and b) the length of time the telescope has to gather light to get the photo. JWST got the photo in hours when Hubble took weeks, and there's easily 10x as many objects in the JWST shot.

JWST can thus observe much fainter and much more distant objects - galaxies billions of years old, exoplanets, etc., and it can do more of it.

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Of course, I get it, but we are allowed to admit that to the average person so far it looks like more of the same.

I'm honestly not sure how you someone can look at those two photos side-by-side and think they're the same. Hubble's is like slapping a 360p cam rip on a 4k TV.

The idea that this looks the same to the average person is insane to me. What aspect of these two photos looks the same?

Yes, we can admit it for some of the images, like the first one (crisper details and new galaxies notwithstanding). Some of them are pretty stunning in the improvement, though, IMO:

- Carina Nebulae: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/vxengq/carina_nebula...

- Southern Ring Nebulae: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/vxfdva/hastily_throw...

The new ones make the old ones look blurry and dull!

What are you expecting to see exactly? Aliens?

Unless you know what you're looking at, most if not everything looks mundane. It's only with perspective that we can grasp the beauty of things like these, or just other things, like ants.

To most people, ants are just an annoying bug. But to scientists (and curious non-scientists), ants are endlessly fascinating creatures. Together with scientists who speak to "common folk", even they can understand the beauty in how ants work.

That's why outreach and education is so important. And sometimes the beauty doesn't come from the direct thing (like these images, although I'd argue they are beautiful by themselves too) but from the indirect implication of the thing (time to acquire the picture, the data gathered to "draw" the picture, the community for even enabling this picture from being drawn and so on).

> JWST got the photo in hours when Hubble took weeks.

For this image, Hubble only had 1.7 hours of exposure while JWST had 12.5 hours.

More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32074989

If they pointed JWST somewhere for weeks instead of hours, would it pick up even more objects, or is it hitting the limit to what exists in that part of space?

You might be able to see some additional fainter objects, but the deep field shot is looking at 13 billion year old galaxies - some of the first in existence. There's not much older you can look at.

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