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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

The person seen photoshopping very briefly talked about how he picks different colours for different region/light-frequency. But yes, more details will definitely be helpful. Also I guess they could open-source the untouched photos for other artists and photoshop experts to play around?

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Everything will be public eventually.

There's a bit on the data policy on wikipedia [1] but basically the operations costs are funded (in part) by people paying for telescope time. The project that is currently paying for the telescope gets exclusive access for a 1 year "embargo" period, after which the data becomes public.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Gro...

Small correction, no one will be able to pay for time on JWST. But if you put in a proposal for time and it's accepted, they will pay you. That's to make sure there is sufficient funds available to properly make use of the data you proposed for.

Actually that's sort of a large correction, thanks for pointing that out. Isn't it a bit of an inversion of the norm in astrophysics? I'd thought many grants included money for telescope time.

They aren't "untouched photos" in any traditional sense, but rather raw data. To visualize astronomical phenomena always requires processing/compositing. For that matter, traditional cameras on earth automate many of the same tasks being done here in Photoshop via debayering.

They did with Hubble:

https://hla.stsci.edu/

This article goes through processing a Hubble image of one of the same objects that Webb did today and includes an example of what it looks like before adjusting for contrast and tone.

https://www.rocketstem.org/2015/04/20/how-astronomers-proces...

All the untouched images will be available in the MAST archives which is where the Hubble data is also available. (https://archive.stsci.edu/)

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