Check out a preview of the first raw images of Saturn taken by the Space Telescope, where the rings shine brightly and the planet appears to be one with space.
The wonders of the James Webb Telescope (JWST) never cease to amaze, its findings in the universe such as the discovery of strange planets, moons or ancestral stars have been contributing to scientific research since 2021.
This time surprised with a series of raw, black and white shots of Saturn, published on the unofficial site JWST feed . The space telescope spent more than two and a half hours over the weekend capturing images showing the planet, its rings and in some its moons.
This is how the James Webb Telescope got the impressive images of Saturn in all its glory
The images were obtained using a NIRCam near infrared spectrography instrument And they have not yet been edited by the space agency. However, they promise to be impressive.
In the image below, one of the most important, Saturn’s rings are shining brightly and the nearly black planet is about to melt into space. Although the planet and its rings shine in infrared and near-infrared wavelengths, the range of wavelengths is different.
As NASA explained in 2010, “Saturn’s rings reflect sunlight at 2 microns, but not at 3 and 5 microns…Saturn’s high-altitude haze reflects sunlight at 2 and 3 microns.”
In this photo, two filters have been used in longer wavelength bands (F323N filter) which excludes light above 3.3 microns and below 3.2 microns, making the almost isolated rings shine against the blackness of space.
In IFLScience explain that methane absorbs radiation in the narrow intermediate band, which makes planets dark when this filter is used. The rings, on the other hand, brilliantly reflect this radiation, making it dominate the image. This time the rings shine even brighter because haze from the planet is knocking down sunlight at longer wavelengths.
The observed white dots are not stars, but noise that affects the image like dust affects the lens of a camera. Once processed, they will be deleted.
In the next image, we can again observe Saturn with the NIRCam, but this time with the F212N filter, which uses shorter wavelengths, so the gas giant appears brighter, managing to capture some cloud bands.
THE observations have been ordered by a team led by planetary scientist Leigh Fletcher from the University of Leicester, UK. They hope to use the NIRSpec data to learn more about Saturn’s moons and rings.
According to the researchers, the spectrograph should be sensitive to the discovery of new moons around the planet. a timely mission given that Saturn temporarily lost its title of most satellite planet to Jupiter for a few months in early 2023.
Another image, also with the F212N filter, but in which one of Saturn’s rings is barely visible, shows some moons and stars in the background, with some noise. However, to fulfill the promise of studying the flow of Enceladus geysers will require much longer exposures.
These images and others were taken in two periods of one hour and 19 minutes each, allowing the moons to change orbits and the cloud patterns to change slightly in between.
NIRCam could lead to incredible space breakthroughs, such as establishing a new point of contact to continue astronomy observations of transients, following the loss of the Cassini space probe in 2017.
Some netizens have already played with the images and made their own editions of Saturn.
Source: Latercera
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