Ok to be honest I know it's not cool to admit it, but so far it all looks the same.
If someone told me that the Webb picture was taken by Hubble I would not have thought about it for an extra second.
I'm hoping that in the future we see pictures of locations and environments that are mind-blowing to the average person who loves space.
The very rough equivalent in computer terms: a 1997 PC computing something and taking a week or so to do it and returning the answer: 3.
The same by the 2022 version: 3.14159265358979323846 in a few milliseconds.
Both the speed of the computation and the resolution of the result are what makes it impressive, not the fact that the nature of the universe does not change fundamentally when viewed across a longer span of time.
It is mind-blowing, but maybe not to the 'average person who loves space'. But if you stop for a bit longer to understand what it took to create that image and what it is that you are actually looking at (the age of the objects involved, their apparent size and the resolving power and temperature of the telescope required to make it) it becomes a lot more impressive.
Understood, i've been following this forever and am super excited to see where it takes us. I'm just saying we are allowed to admit that to us these pictures look like more of the same despite knowing that they are very much not.
To me they do not and I am probably also an 'average person who loves space', in fact I'm blown away by the results on display here and it is way beyond my expectations. From a tech perspective this is humanity at its peak.
The difference is in a) the details and b) the length of time the telescope has to gather light to get the photo. JWST got the photo in hours when Hubble took weeks, and there's easily 10x as many objects in the JWST shot.
JWST can thus observe much fainter and much more distant objects - galaxies billions of years old, exoplanets, etc., and it can do more of it.
I'm honestly not sure how you someone can look at those two photos side-by-side and think they're the same. Hubble's is like slapping a 360p cam rip on a 4k TV.
Yes, we can admit it for some of the images, like the first one (crisper details and new galaxies notwithstanding). Some of them are pretty stunning in the improvement, though, IMO:
Unless you know what you're looking at, most if not everything looks mundane. It's only with perspective that we can grasp the beauty of things like these, or just other things, like ants.
To most people, ants are just an annoying bug. But to scientists (and curious non-scientists), ants are endlessly fascinating creatures. Together with scientists who speak to "common folk", even they can understand the beauty in how ants work.
That's why outreach and education is so important. And sometimes the beauty doesn't come from the direct thing (like these images, although I'd argue they are beautiful by themselves too) but from the indirect implication of the thing (time to acquire the picture, the data gathered to "draw" the picture, the community for even enabling this picture from being drawn and so on).
If they pointed JWST somewhere for weeks instead of hours, would it pick up even more objects, or is it hitting the limit to what exists in that part of space?
You might be able to see some additional fainter objects, but the deep field shot is looking at 13 billion year old galaxies - some of the first in existence. There's not much older you can look at.
These are just the initial "pretty pictures" processed to look nice and promoted as part of NASA's ongoing fundraising. The more valuable science payload is in the spectral data which will tell us about the composition of these objects. Another exciting aspect of of JWST is the IR instrument (NIRCAM) which can see red shifted wavelengths revealing much older objects from the early universe.
To me, the real 'shock and awe' will be when scientific papers are published which reveal new knowledge and deeper understanding of our universe. This will take some time although I'm sure the first papers are already racing toward pre-print.
I kind of agree with you, these pictures do look like more of the same. But that's okay, the real exciting stuff isn't going to be pretty pictures, it's going to be what astronomers and physicists are able to learn by peering deep into the origins of the universe. The pictures of galaxies are nice to look at, but the real ramifications of JWST will take years to play out.
I'm hoping that in the future we see pictures of locations and environments that are mind-blowing to the average person who loves space.