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Re:James Webb is fully deployed by heavenlyblue on Saturday January 08, 2022 @07:38PM (#29858429)
It’s interesting that you are expressing an opinion about something that you could calculate in the same amount of time it took to write down that opinion.
Re:James Webb is fully deployed by idealmedtech on Saturday January 08, 2022 @10:31PM (#29859715)
It's been over a decade since my last astrophysics class, but I appreciate you being charitable about my assumed knowledge! I think if anything this thread shows:

1) how absolutely mindblowingly big space is

2) how bad humans really are at intuiting things at the scale of space

Re:James Webb is fully deployed by weaksauce on Saturday January 08, 2022 @07:48PM (#29858496)
It seems like they are going for the "the easiest way to get a right answer is give the wrong answer on the internet" approach.
Re:James Webb is fully deployed by Spare_account on Saturday January 08, 2022 @07:50PM (#29858511)
Re:James Webb is fully deployed by Sebb767 on Saturday January 08, 2022 @09:18PM (#29859206)
To be fair, for someone who is not well-versed in either optics or space physics, calculating the answer is not that straight-forward.
Re:James Webb is fully deployed by kadoban on Sunday January 09, 2022 @01:42PM (#29866101)
You can do pretty well just comparing the ratios of the size to the distance, right? Or is it more than that?
Re:James Webb is fully deployed by idealmedtech on Sunday January 09, 2022 @03:36PM (#29867080)
That's a start, for sure, but to do a super accurate calculation (the kind I feel unqualified to carry out), you need to take into account apparent size, redshift, whether or not there's gravitational lensing, interstellar dust in the way, etc etc.

But I want to reiterate that what's meaningful about this discussion is in part how unintuitive things at the far edges of our scales of perception really are. It's a muscle that, left untrained, will lead you to make incorrect characterizations like the one I made.