Thread by @hankgreen

As you may have heard The James Webb Space Telescope will be releasing "data from its first five targets" on Tuesday. I'm no astronomer but here's what I've gathered about what that means, and what we'll see.

Four of the five sets of data will come in the form of pictures of our universe that will give us both resolution and wavelengths we've never seen before.

Resolution means...just more pixels per unit of sky.

Wavelengths means kinds of light that we haven't been able to see.

The other data set will be the spectrum of the atmosphere of WASP-96b, a gas giant about half the size of Jupiter that's around 1000 light years away. Webb promises to be by far our best tool for getting data on the atmospheres of exoplanets, which will be a tremendous win.

As for the four images...here are our targets. Three of these are going to be absolutely stunningly beautiful visually, the other one is going to be the kind of picture that nestles into your mind and creates a weight that will never leave you.

This is the Southern Ring Nebula. It's a planetary nebula...gas thrown off by a red giant at the end of its life. This is a well-studied nebula, which is always a good early target as it will allow scientists to see now new data fits into the old.

Second we have the Carina Nebula, a different sort of nebula...a cloud of gas and dust giving birth to NEW stars. It's one of the largest nebulas in the sky and it contains a variety of stars at different stages of formation. It's also just VERY CHARISMATIC.

Zooming way out, this is Stephan's Quintet...five galaxies packed so close together you'd think they were photoshopped. Two of these galaxies are actively colliding! Again, a well-studied patch of the sky that contains TONS of opportunities for new insight.

And then last, proof that they're JUST GOING FOR IT, it's SMACS 0723. We started quite close, just 1000 light years away, now we are going to look, oh, y'know, 13 or 14 BILLION light years away. And the way we are doing it is MADNESS.

The promise of Webb has always been to see farther away (and thus farther back in time) than we have ever seen, and that's what this is about. SMACS 0723 is a galaxy cluster so massive that light /bends/ around it. And what is a telescope but a tool for bending light?

This gravitation distortion allows us to use this galaxy cluster as a lens. In effect, we are pointing the world's best man-made telescope at the universe's best natural telescope.

We're going to see what's on the other side of that, which is, very nearly...the beginning.

So, get hyped. This is one of the coolest things humanity has ever done and the mission is just getting started.