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The James Webb Space Telescope
is exploring the universe

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and it's revealed sights
humanity has never seen.

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Music

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So the goals of the first images
were to showcase the impressive

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capabilities of JWST to the public
and to the astronomical community

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at large.

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And the subsequent images have been 
taken more for specific science questions

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that have been asked by the various 
groups in the astronomical community.

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And so those pictures are much more 
tied to specific science questions.

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And still, they're beautiful.

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The JWST mission has taken a long time to get here.

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It's been 20, 25 years in production,

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and so it's been a lot of effort
by a lot of people,

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including myself, over a decade
and a half myself on the mission.

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And so to actually get to the point

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where we get to see the pictures,
the fruits of all that work was really,

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really amazing for me to 
finally see that come through.

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And they were just so spectacular.

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It was excellent.

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It paid back all that effort
and more for me.

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So for a team of scientists to get 
time to actually observe with Webb,

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the first thing they need to do is write a proposal.

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And so that proposal is a text, but it also comes

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with what they want to do,
what targets they want to observe,

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and which instruments they want
to use on JWST and which modes.

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And so then that gets put together and
submitted, submits here to the Institute.

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But then the Institute convenes a panel of experts

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from outside the Institute
for us all astronomers.

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And then they get to rank
they look at all the proposals

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in a specific area and then rank them,
and the top ranked proposals

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then get forwarded to 
actually take their observations.

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When a science team is awarded
time to work with Webb.

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They start by using a special software
to set the required parameters

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for the telescope
to conduct their science.

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The software allow scientists
to use different modes

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on Webb's instruments to 
 achieve their scientific objectives.

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When it's time for the observation,
the code instructs the telescope

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to locate the target object and 
capture several images of it.

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Light from the target object is processed
through the instruments and the raw data

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the science team requires is stored
onto Webb's onboard hard drive.

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Once the team's data is collected,
their data and images are transmitted

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to Earth

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from Webb to NASA's
Deep Space Network ground stations,

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where their data gets routed directly
to the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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Once we get the data here in 
Baltimore at the Institute,

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then we run it through our pipeline.

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That is a series of steps
that removes the artifacts

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from the instrument or 
the detectors that we know about,

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because we've taken extensive
calibration observations

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and we now produce these cleaned 
images that are just about the

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astrophysical source we're interested in.

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And then the all those images
go into an archive here

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at the Institute that's then 
available to the proposers

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that they can then download it
and start doing their science on it.

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So if we're going to produce a 
color image out of the observations,

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then we take we've taken 
multiple images in different filters.

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And then those after 
they've been processed through

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and removed all 
the instrumental artifacts,

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then we pass them along to the 
experts in our public outreach office

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that then turn them into the really
sensational color images that we all love.

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When you're processing
any sort of astronomical image,

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those images are taken
through different filters.

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So the light's captured through 
different filters and it starts out grayscale.

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And then so you actually 
get color information

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from taking the light in those filters,
and then you assign colors afterwards

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like an image processor will assign colors.

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And we do this typically 
what we call chromatic ordering,

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which just means that the 
shortest wavelengths gets assigned.

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The blue color in between it's green,
and then the longest wavelength

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gets assigned the red color.

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And then we additively combine those
together to get our full color image.

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The reason we want to color the images
is because there's actually more

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that you can get, more information

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that you can get from the 
image if you see it in color.

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If you're looking at a 
galaxy in optical light,

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we expect that they're going to be 
star forming regions

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and they're going to show up
as these bright blue regions.

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And then if there's hydrogen gas around
them, that will show up as bright red.

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And so if we can apply the 
color to the different filters

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and make an image in color, you can 
actually just see that right away.

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And you learn something new from 
the image by seeing it in color.

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Webb's imagery and science are revolutionary.

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It's challenging our theories of 
the universe and generating more

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questions we need to answer.

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Music