4.3 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Camilo Varasson. |
0:12.0 | In July, the White House released the first image of the collection of pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope, |
0:18.0 | the JWST during a preview event with President Joe Biden. |
0:23.0 | Six and a half months ago, a rocket launched from Earth carrying the world's newest, most powerful deep space telescope. |
0:29.0 | On a journey, one million miles into the cosmos, it's a new window into the history of our universe. |
0:36.0 | And today, we're going to get a glimpse of the first light to shine through that window. |
0:41.0 | It was a high-resolution image of a cluster of distant galaxies known as Smax 0723. |
0:47.0 | It was the deepest, sharpest infrared image of the universe ever. |
0:52.0 | The image had to be seen to be believed. |
0:55.0 | And on that day, it was everywhere to see and ponder, from the big screen in Times Square to trillions of small screens around the world. |
1:04.0 | But what if you are physically unable to see it? |
1:07.0 | Smax 0723 |
1:10.0 | The background of space is black. Thousands of galaxies appear all across the view. |
1:16.0 | Their shapes and colors vary. Some are various shades of orange. Others are white. |
1:23.0 | Most stars appear blue, and are sometimes as large as more distant galaxies that appear next to them. |
1:30.0 | A very bright star is just above and left of center. It has eight bright blue long diffraction space. |
1:38.0 | Descriptive, scientific. |
1:41.0 | And if you were unable to see, you would, for the first time, be able to construct a mental image of what the rest of the seeing world saw. |
1:50.0 | When I think about people listening to the alt text that we write, I want it to be like listening to a book. |
1:57.0 | Where you imagine the scene, all the characters in the scene, and in these cases, it might be galaxies and stars as the characters, all the activity in it. |
2:07.0 | That's Claire Blum, principal science writer at the Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, the operations center for the web telescope. |
2:16.0 | And alt text, as you might have gathered, is an official way to describe and make accessible the contents of an image to someone that might not be able to see it with their own eyes. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -935 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Scientific American, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Scientific American and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.