1
This is Titan, Saturn's largest Moon captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
(programming.dev)
I think I need glasses.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
interestingasfuck
5957 readers
1 users here now
interestingasfuck
founded 1 year ago
odd that it can pick up light from the universe's placenta but can't get a good shot of that kid down the street
remember that JWST doesn't do visible spectrum and, regardless, it's specialized for faint distant objects. From JWST's perspective, Titan emits a lot of light. It's kind of like using a telephoto lens to take a picture of your foot.
People in general don't understand focal length and spectrums. It's just oooh 400x zoom, fancy, let's see atoms.
Almost looks like earth but with more land than water.
In infrared. Titan basically looks like a brownish grey blob to the naked eye due to its incredibly dense atmosphere.
Knowing it's just color shifted makes me wonder if that white band in the upper right that looks like a reflection off the atmosphere is actually a reflection off the atmosphere. And also what method of color shifting was used. Are the colors representative of anything or did they just pick what made for the best photo?
Yooooo! It's beautiful!!! 😍
Titan is about 40% the size of the planet Earth, and is the 10th largest object in the solar system.
Going from memory here...
Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus/Neptune (don't recall which order those two belong in), Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, then finally Titan.
I'll look it up in a moment, but I wanted to post off the top of my head.
Ah! I was a little off. Ganymede and Titan are BOTH larger than tiny little Mercury.
Only one has sea rats, though.
I can't wait for the conspiracy theorists to say it has water oceans.
Isn't that an actual scientific theory about it? That it could have an ocean of liquid water under the surface of ice? Maybe I'm thinking of a different moon...
That's Europa. The thinking is that Europa may have life in its oceans beneath the ice that feed off of geothermal vents and therefore don't require any sunlight.
Okay but are they delicious?
People who instantly believe every thought that occurs to them aren't conspiracy theorists per se, but there's not a lot of cleavage in that Venn diagram.
Umm it pretty clearly does.
Source: it comes in blue
That's just what Big Primary Colors want you to think.
Yeah, to sell printer ink.
The bad English makes it read as if there are other, larger, moons of Saturn, but the JWST hasn't captured them yet.
People saying this is blurry... have you considered: every other image is stitched, edited, overlaid and colorized, whereas this is a picture that's actually quite close to that from the camera of JWST.
JWST doesn’t see visible light, so it’s blurry and false color.
But JWST also wasn’t designed to take pictures of moons in our solar system, it was designed to take picture of the cosmic background and find stars with planets around them.
This is like trying to use a telescope to look at your globe across the living room, it’s going to be blurry because it wasn’t designed for that.
Image from 2022 using infrared imaging with the goal of spotting clouds on Titan. The white spot that looks like a bubble reflection on the upper right of the image (1 o'clock?) is a cloud.
This is not true color, but colors assigned to different the wavelengths that we otherwise cannot see. Visible light would not have allowed imaging deep enough into the atmosphere to see clouds.
Surely you mean "to see anything but clouds", right?
Nope! They got to see two cloud actually! A second set of images exists from Keck Observatory with the other cloud.
The thick atmosphere isn't cloudy, just dense with methane.
I'm not 100%, but the clouds are exciting I think because they demonstrate seasonal changes.
view more: next ›