Colorizing Images from the James Webb Space Telescope

Summary

Areas of Science

Astronomy

Difficulty

Method

Engineering Design Process

Time Required

Short (2-5 days)

Credits

Ben Finio, PhD, Science Buddies

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Abstract

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has shown us some amazing images of space, like its first "deep field" image (Figure 1). The JWST sees the universe in the infrared part of the electromagnet spectrum, which is not visible to the human eye. How, then, does it produce color images like the one in Figure 1? Scientists must colorize the images, or apply "false color." They map different bands of the infrared spectrum to colors of visible light, resulting in an image humans can view. Luckily, the raw infrared data is free for anyone to download—so you can download the source files and make your own colorized images!

Figure 1. JWST's first deep field image, which shows thousands of galaxies visible in just a tiny area of the sky. You can download a higher-resolution version of the image here. Zoom in and look at all the galaxies!

The Science Buddies project X-Ray Vision: Seeing Into Space gives a detailed walk-through of this process for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, another telescope that sees space in part of the electromagnet spectrum not visible to the human eye (x-rays). You can follow a similar procedure to work with JWST images. To do so, you need to access the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files for the JWST (thanks to this blog post from AstroExploring for instructions). Note that since websites can change over time, these instructions may become out of date, and you may need to look up more recent instructions.

1. Go to the website for the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.
2. Click "Advanced Search" at the top.
3. Type "JWST" in the "Mission" box. 
4. To narrow down the search, in the "Object Name" box, search for the astronomical catalog ID of the object you want to find (for example, you need to search for "NGC3324" not "Carina Nebula").
5. Click the "Search" button in the top left corner of the screen.
6. This will display a list of images taken with filters for different wavelengths. You can read more about the different filters for the near and mid infrared instruments on the NIRCam and MIRI pages.
7. Download the images that you want by clicking the floppy disk icon at the left of each row. Note that some of the files are very large (several gigabytes), so the downloads might take a while.
8. Unzip the downloaded folders and find the FITS files. You may need to dig around in subfolders to find the correct files. 

You should now be ready to follow the same procedure described in the X-Ray Vision: Seeing Into Space project. Can you create your own colorized images from the JWST's source files?

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Careers

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Astronomer

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Astronomers think big! They want to understand the entire universe—the nature of the Sun, Moon, planets, stars, galaxies, and everything in between. An astronomer's work can be pure science—gathering and analyzing data from instruments and creating theories about the nature of cosmic objects—or the work can be applied to practical problems in space flight and navigation, or satellite communications. Read more

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