HOW IS COLOUR ADDED TO THE JWST IMAGES?
BENJAMIN MARSH, VIA EMAIL
This July we were treated to the first spectacular images taken with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). But JWST is an infrared (IR) telescope, meaning that it is not seeing what the human eye sees. In fact, JWST is detecting what we feel as ‘heat’, just like night-vision goggles, and the JWST images are just a representation of its view in optical light. So, the colours in the JWST image are not real – they are not what your eye would see.