Looking at the Webb Images I was instantly reminded of Carl Sagan's remarks on this Voyager 1 photo: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/resources/detail_files/536_PIA23645_PaleBlueDotRevisited_1600.jpg

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

"The man told officers that he knew who lives in the house and that he wanted to pitch a tent on their property..."

Say what now?

The long star spikes are huge - a fault of the lens?

@4 from the NASA press release: "Other features include the prominent arcs in this field. The powerful gravitational field of a galaxy cluster can bend the light rays from more distant galaxies behind it, just as a magnifying glass bends and warps images. Stars are also captured with prominent diffraction spikes, as they appear brighter at shorter wavelengths."

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet

@3

Maybe an ignorant person thinking that Jayapal does City Council stuff and is responsible for something involving encampments or just the existence of unhoused persons?

DEFUSED. Not "diffused". Fuck's sake.

@4 Those are diffraction spikes from the support arms of the telescope's secondary mirror, which relfects light from the primary mirror back to the sensors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike

"A quantum leap forward in time and space
The universe learned to expand..." -- Rush, 'Natural Science'

NASA pulled the same trick with the Hubble, about a quarter-century ago: pointed it at a tiny spot in the sky where we'd never previously seen anything, et voila, more galaxies than one can easily count. It's just that Webb's images are even further 'way back in time. That Pale Blue Dot just keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller...

"I can't wait to be a trillionth of a pixel on a photo billions of years in the future."

Who says you haven't already?

@12 - I was wondering the same thing. If a guy with a gun threatening to kill you is not enough, what the hell would it take?

Somebody forward this to that asshat in Mill Creek, Land of Asshats: https://aclupa.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/canvassing_faq.pdf

likewise tS's
resident
Jerk.

That picture that purports to be from the Webb Telescope is a hoax. It's a mind altering hologram manufactured by Democrat operatives in Italy & Mesopotamia which is operated by bouncing signals off the Tellstar communications satellite. When people spend more than 6.023x10^23 seconds looking at it, they begin to believe that Nancy Pelosi is really the wife of Mitch McConnell. They were married in a ceremony in Benghazi Libya which was broadcast by Chinese operatives using equipment brought from Mars by Elon Musk.

"“Get out of my fucking neighborhood! I don’t want you here,”"
It just boggles my mind. All I can do is put hand to forehead & shake my head to think that there are actually people like this. All my life I've been taught this is wrong yet that there are people like this. But I don't think I'd ever actually seen one until I was in my 60s. I mean I've seen & heard plenty of people who had & expressed racist opinions like that, but I never saw anyone who was stupid enough to actually act like they own the street. I guess I lived a very sheltered life.
However I have met this kind of stupidity regarding other subjects. If I may suggest, if you meet someone like this, you must be as careful & polite as Julian Jackson was in this video. But in addition to being an idiot, the bigot is also a coward. So first, tell him if he really believes he can throw you out of his neighborhood because you need a permit to canvas, tell him to do it. Tell him to call the police. After they think about it for a minute, all idiots who threaten to call the police on you realize they don't want to explain themselves to the police. And when he says he owns multiple properties, tell him DEFINITELY call the police because NOBODY owns property that is without a violation of some kind. Tell him you'll be happy to talk to the police because you don't need a permit, but you're sure the police will find multiple violations on his property. Generally after babbling for another minute or two, the idiot will realize he doesn't want to wind up in housing court and he will disappear because, while he's crazy, he's not stupid. Well, maybe another kind of stupid.

@4, it's called a diffraction something. (https://physics.fandom.com/wiki/Diffraction https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Diffraction) I can't remember the second word. If you look at a picture of the telescope, there's 3 legs holding up the mirror or image processor at the focal point. Even though the legs are dark, the light behind & passing around the legs causes those 'star' radiating lines. And it can happen that even though there's only 3 legs to the side of center, the optics can cause 6 lines to appear radiating from bright objects. It's not exactly a fault. It's just a design property of reflecting telescopes which have something mounted in front of the main mirror. Ah, @9 is correct.

@15, yeah, what you said.

@16, Carl Sagan isn't dead. He was carried off to Beta Zed by the Kardashians. Kim I believe. It was after being irradiated to make him immortal. It was a replicant in the casket.

David Cox of Mill Creek, can't be that hard to find one of those (first couple seconds of the video).