The colorful shots taken by the space telescope are in fact the result of meticulous work of translation of radiation invisible to the human eye. Manufacturing mode.
Monday, September 12, two new images of the James-Webb space telescope of the American, European and Canadian agencies, are broadcast. They show two areas of the Orion nebula, located in the constellation of the same name at 1,350 light years from the Earth, in our Milky Way. It is the closest to the children’s nursery, these regions of gas, dust and stars where stars are still born and where researchers hope to find analogues of what our solar system in formation was. Colorful, textured, as animated by movements of storms or bubbling waters, these two images dazzle. And surprise. Why do you see something when the radiation detected by the telescope is invisible, because it is located in the infrared. Immersed in the factory of these images, over twenty-four hours.
Saturday September 10, 9 p.m. The 6.5 meter mirror of the James-Webb, located 1.5 million kilometers from the earth, imperceptibly pivoted to target the Orion nebula, after having captured the light of the white dwarf G191-B2B. For two fifty-seven minutes, one of the four instruments, Nircam, captures the precious light grains emitted by M42, the precise name of the nursery.
Sunday, September 11, 00:40. The results are transmitted in the MAST Public Database of Space Telescope Science Institute (STSCI) from the United States. Surprise: the images are really ugly. In black and white, striated, blurred …
9 hours. In Toulouse, the head of the 1288 program devoted to Orion, Olivier Berné (research institute in astrophysics and planetology), sounds the recall of the troops to make these images speak at least for five years. Her two colleagues research engineers, Amélie Canin and Ilane Schroetter, spin in the laboratory. They start to download the data … on the steps, their badge not working on Sunday. Their manager, endowed with sesame, arrives accompanied by a central actress for the activity of the day, Salomé Fuenmayor, a young Spanish graphic designer, responsible for transforming initial ugliness in universal beauty.