James Webb Space Telescope looks closer to home with Jupiter snaps Instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope have turned closer to home to snap images showing the gas giant Jupiter. The James Webb team started the week with some frankly jaw-dropping imagery of deep space and have rounded it out with images of Jupiter and spectra of several asteroids. The captures were performed to test …
This initial run of photos are being chosen for wow factor, so some of these bodies aren't lined up in their ideal positions relative to the scope/earth. I expect it will be looking hard at the trans-ur.. er trans-neptunians (guess even astronomy changes on a long enough timetable) as well as the deeper Kuiper belt objects.
Since we have already done close flybys of a few of them, it will be interesting to see how the new "Big Eye" compares and how dynamic some of those systems are.
Pluto is in just about it's closest - but it's very small so might not be that interesting
Saturn is currently closer than than Jupiter - but it's directly away from Earth so not ideal for the telescope's current set of targets.
Not sure what its maximum pointing angle is compared to the Sun-Earth shield ?
Saturn is currently closer than than Jupiter…Of course these things are always changing somewhat, but as I write this, Saturn is 8.968 AU from Earth, 9.876 AU from the Sun, whilst Jupiter is 4.565 AU from Earth, 4.961 AU from the Sun. I'm guessing you might have meant either 'closer' in some other sense, like closer to opposition, or closer to some other other object?
Certainly I think resolution will be lower than spacecraft close to planets (for instance Juno), simply due to physics of telescopes. But this is not what they are for: JWST can observe at wavelengths which have not previously been possible and so will give us information we previously could not have: certainly not from ground-based telescope and to date not from spacecraft near planets either.
Angular values can be tricky to visualise, it needs something big and circular that's known to lot's of people and isn't too big.
I considered the London Eye Ferris wheel thingy - from the axis to the rim 30 milliarcseconds would be represented by 0.004 millimetres of the rim or 0.00000285714 linguine.
I think the Register Standards Soviet needs some smaller units.
https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
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You must be American. You not realise that turtles have flippers and live in the sea. The only time they crawl is when they hatch and run to the sea, and try not to get eaten, or when they need to lay their eggs on a beach.
Tortoises, on the other hand, have legs, and crawl on land. They also can't swim.
People who so "The story of the turtle and the rabbit" are morons. It's "The tortoise and the hare"
The BBC went through a decade or two of comparing everything to the surface area of Wales. I don't know if it was just one journalist, or a deliberate insiders joke, but it culminated in something astronomical being compared to the weight of Wales.
The weight of Wales?! Is that right down to the centre of the earth or just the topsoil and coal heaps?
Maybe 5-6 years ago, I thought we must have reached Peak Comparison. It seemed every single measurement reported anywhere had to be compared to some other completely unrelated thing, as if that would help "normal" people understand better.
But it hasn't gone away. The company magazine recently reported how much food waste is thrown away in the UK in cliched units of double-decker buses, because that's so much "easier" to visualise.
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