Can we talk about how stacked Hubble vs Webb images actually compare

I was real skeptical when people kept saying Webb photos just look better because of processing. Then I spent an afternoon pulling raw data from both telescopes on the same target, the Pillars of Creation. Hubble's version is sharp but you can see where it hits its limit in infrared. Webb caught dust structures that are just invisible in Hubble's shots, no amount of editing would bring those out. Has anyone else sat down and really compared the raw files side by side?

3 comments

3 Comments

henrycooper1mo ago

Buddy of mine out in Arizona does astrophotography as a side gig. He spent a whole weekend last month pulling raw data from both scopes on the same patch of sky, the Carina Nebula. He showed me his side by side in his processing software. Hubble got the bright stars and some gas clouds but there were these dark lanes where you could tell something should be there but it was just dead noise. Webb's raw frames on the same area lit up with these twisting columns of dust that had faint color gradients in them. He got so frustrated he just sat there staring at his monitor for like ten minutes.

grace_allen21d ago

That raw FITS data thing is wild... my brother does some amateur processing and he showed me the same thing with the Orion Nebula. Hubble's MIRI channel at like 5.6 microns just gives you these flat dark patches where you know there's structure but it's all buried. Then Webb's NIRCam at 2.1 microns pulls out these twisted ropes of molecular hydrogen that look like they're glowing from the inside out. He overlayed them in GIMP and the color shift between the two was insane, like going from a black and white photo to a color negative. The dust columns in Webb's data had this faint pinkish hue near the tips that Hubble just couldn't pick up at all.

samjohnson1mo agoMost Upvoted

I grabbed the raw FITS files for the Pillars from both archives last month. Hubble's near-infrared channel on WFC3 shows the stars fine but the dark dust clouds just look like empty gaps. Webb's NIRCam at 4.7 microns reveals these long thin fingers of gas and dust that are totally missing in Hubble's data. I stacked them myself in PixInsight with the same stretching routine and Webb's raw frames had signal where Hubble's just had noise. The difference is real and it's not just processing.