The stunning new photos of the pillars of creation are made even more stunning when you consider the massive scale – 5 light years tall, 6500 light years away. How do we get photos of something that takes 6500 years for the light/image to reach us ?
EDIT: ya’ll I feel silly now after having a day to think about this. I’ll blame my initial confusion on sleep deprivation. Goodnight.
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Essentially just really sensitive equipment. The camera sensors of JWST, or Hubble, or any other space telescope work in a similar way to our regular cameras, but they’re considerably more sensitive. That means they pick up a lot more photons, which is necesary since theres very little light reaching us from those objects. They also have really big lenses because the wider the lens, the more light it will capture. Lastly, they usually have very long exposures, which means they’re collecting photons for a long time for each picture. Its the exact same as long exposure photos that we do on Earth. Theres not much more to it on a basic level, the really hard part is getting that sensitivity out of the equipment.
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