I have an admission to make. You know all of those stunning new images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope? I haven’t been all that interested in them. I feel like I should be. I’m an amateur astronomer and part of what got me into the hobby as a kid were all of those wonderful Hubble images. I’m now a professional in the aerospace industry and have even worked on a couple of astrophysics missions. So why don’t I care?

I think I’ve become saturated. The JWST images are, of course, a technological tour de force and more detailed than anything we’ve had before, but without the scientific background to really understand what is going on all I see is a pretty picture sort of like the ones I’ve seen before. It’s like when I spend too much time in an art museum and my eyes start to glaze over at yet another still life or landscape. A trained art historian could point out all the wonderful differences and innovations but at some point, it becomes too much.

I also have trouble connecting with the end product. Images of deep space are never raw. They represent reams of data that have been processed, passed through all sorts of filters and optimizations, and generally presented in such a way to be pleasing to our human eyes. It’s obviously “real” and there is an immense amount of valuable scientific data there, but I find it lacking.

For me, the best way to connect with the universe is still in my backyard (preferably one darker than Los Angeles) looking through a telescope with my own eyes. There is effort needed to learn about the sky and locate objects within it, and that effort provides a bridge from myself to the universe in a way that the pretty pictures are unable to. In short, the first-hand experience is more important to me than the second-hand knowledge.