A few quiet beats tick by after the projector shows the image. Everyone is working on something.
People are laughing as they watch more "WOWs" bubble out. Suddenly two astronomy professors, Amaya Moro-Martin and Karl Gordon, are out of their chairs and staring at the screen. There is a crisp, hallucinatory grandeur of new stars that sprouted from a flower bed.
The screen zooms in towards a jutting promontory that stands out in relief.
Someone said that someone was me.
Someone says hello to the team.
The view of the Carina Nebula was made public on Tuesday morning along with other new observations. On another Tuesday morning in June, a small team clutching coffee cups gathered around a conference table at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore to receive, process and repackage for public consumption what humanity's latest and greatest.
No one knew how to describe this picture. The astronomer didn't know some of it. Dr. Gordon pointed at the arch thing.
They could call it a candy cane. What do you think about the rest of it? It was granted that there was no land and that any actual worlds out there were small. There is a valley under a sky. In gusts larger than our solar system, mist rises off a mountain valley. There is a coastline in the Caribbean. Either sand dunes or something else. It could be a veil with space shining through.
The early highlight reel for the $10 billion space observatory was assembled over the course of six weeks. It was to be a packet of first-glimpse visuals intended to tease the ultimate promise of a space mission more expensive than the rest of the cinematic universe.
The day before the release, President Biden introduced one of the images at the White House. He said that the images would remind the world that America could do big things.
It had taken decades of planning, threats, delays, and a round of reverse origami to unfold the telescope in deep space without breaking it. Blow everyone's mind, show policymakers what all those appropriations had paid for, and assure the rest of the scientific world that yes, some of the universe's most important work was done in Baltimore.
The stakes were underscored by Hubble, the new telescope's still- functioning predecessor. Hubble's first look images made it obvious that its mirror was flawed, angering congress and turning the project into a joke. After successful repairs, scientists working on Hubble produced jaw-dropping photos of the universe like the Pillars of Creation. Before I became a science journalist, I worked as a data analyst for Hubble, which is run out of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Veteran astronomer had no idea what to expect from James Webb, a beast so advanced that even veteran astronomer had no idea what to expect. There is a lot of that because of the Webb. Clouds that look solid to Hubble, distant galaxies grow brighter, new details rise out from the black, and space itself is set aglow by the light of organic molecule coughed out in the last gasps of dying are some of the things that can be seen at these frequencies.
To show off this stuff, you need a color scheme and style. The first images would be pushed out within six weeks. The cone of silence around the project could prove lonely because of the perks of staring into the bottomless pit of the universe for weeks on end.
The astronomer leading the early release team, Klaus Pontoppidan, was the first person to download the telescope's full view. This long look at distant galaxies peers further back toward the start of time and the edge of space than any instrument of humanity has ever done. He said that he was staring at it for two hours and then desperately wanted to share it with another person. "I couldn't."
Space exploration is much more than that. There are stories that matter. They are often told by imagery, from an above-the-fold print to a slickly produced livestream. The tradition goes back as far as the 1960s, when James Webb, an early NASA administrator, embraced art and visual communication as a key part of justifying the Apollo program.
Lois Rosson is a historian of science at the University of Southern California. The State Department's purge of gay employees led to calls for NASA to change the name of the telescope.
She says NASA flooded the public domain with views of both the astronauts themselves and photographs taken by the astronauts. The goal was to make a difference. The crew of Apollo 8 snapped a famous shot, "Earthrise", on Christmas Eve in 1968, which shows our world as a fragile blue crescent above the lunar surface. The first words of Genesis, which the astronauts had read back to Earth as they circled the moon, were printed on a stamp by the US Postal Service.
After Apollo funding dried up, a new visual culture emerged from NASA missions connected to the Jet Propulsion Lab in California. For the sake of intellectual curiosity, they promoted a new rationale to wander into the expanse. The news media and politicians were invited to see the first glimpse of other planets at a party. According to Elizabeth Kessler, a historian of visual culture, at the beginning of digital imagery engineers were experimenting with combining multi-wavelength data into pictures with ultra-vivid colors. She said that they looked like throbbing, shifting, morphing colors.
The next leap came with Hubble in the mid 1990s, after a constellation of innovations: the unprecedented eagle-eyed vision of the repaired telescope itself, much faster tools for digital processing and a budding internet. New conventions were adopted by engineers and imageprocessors in depictions of the universe.
Composition is one concern. Space is directionless, but many of the most famous Hubble photographs place solid-seeming surfaces at the bottom of the frame. The visual style invokes landscapes that are at once traversable in theory and staggeringly vast, following a distinctly American graphic language burrowed deep in our collective minds. Think of 19th-century paintings from surveys of the Western frontier, the photography of Ansel Adams, and the background scenery in countless Westerns, all of which can be found on a Macintosh computer.
In parallel, imageprocessors working with Hubble data adopted a color scheme that dominated the world of deep Cosmic Photography. This system, still widespread today, follows a rule called chromatic ordering that echoes the way our visual systems perceive short wavelength light as blue, long wavelength as green, and the longest wavelength as red.
Matching an exact wavelength that the telescope saw to the exact color it would appear as in human eyes isn't a problem for the Hubble color pallet. If you were to look out of the window of a spaceship, you'd see a green vista. The order rule is still intact. The shortest wavelength in an image is almost always rendered in blue. It's a balancing act between naturalism and what it might look like to see this scene with superhuman senses, but richer in information about the hot and cold clouds that produce these light shows in the first place.
The use of chromatic ordering, which squeezes color information out of the infrared wavelength that human eyes can't see, continues in the same vein as the Webb mission, which runs out of the same office building. Astronomers had to come up with a solution after the most powerful set of eyes had opened for the first time.
The committee of representatives from the Space Telescope Science Institute, NASA, and the European and Canadian space agencies met in 2016 to choose the first demo targets. The telescope has scientific goals such as a deeper-than-ever deep field, a star with an attendant exoplanet, star-forming regions and more. Around 70 potential targets were nominated by this process.
Once the telescope had begun operating this winter, they narrowed the list down to the regions of the sky it could point to within six weeks, as the telescope's scientific endeavors revved into gear.
The first results trickled in through Dr. Pontoppidan's computer in early June, his being the only user account granted access. The team combined raw frames into deeper, more polished exposures and then passed them on to image processors.
Joe Depasquale, the lead image processor on the project, said that he felt overwhelmed when he saw one scene of another star-forming nebula come together. He said this would blow people's minds. It's confirmed.
He said that there were a few visual signatures. A quirk that emerges from the quantum mumbo-jumbo of how incoming photons lap against this telescope's structure and are then gathered up by its hexagonal mirrors is what makes stars in the images have six points.
He said that clouds that look diffuse seem to have hard soap bubble surfaces and skins of interstellar gas that are absorbing ultraviolet light from nearby stars and shining it back into space.
When space is glowing because of glowing molecule called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced by aging stars, colors get blurry. Mr. Depasquale said that they ended up with purple clouds.
The Apollo shots were very hard. The Hubble pics were plastered on the walls of science classrooms and everyone watched them. It will be seen. The universe is pouring in because the tap is open.
The participants in the early June meeting shifted their attention to another observation that was held back from Tuesday's initial releases.
Dr. Moro-Martin thinks she might be looking at a simulation after sitting down at the Carina Nebula. She wanted to know if this was the real one. She gasped and sent the room into a round of laughter.
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