One arcsecond is about 5microradians… A resolution of a microradian roughly means you could resolve two points separated by a meter at a distance of 1000 kilometers…

They are trying to get giant Radio telescope arrays made up of dishes on the Earth and in space that will have sub micro-arcsecond resolution… Pico-radian resolution… That is like being able to resolve the bumps on a blood cell at 1000 kilometers. Blood cells are ~8 microns across, we are talking resolution equivalent to 1 micron at 1000 kilometers.

They ALREADY have demonstrated 60 micro-arcsec resolution when they took that famous picture of a black hole a few years back…that’s approximately the angular size of a baseball on the moon as seen from earth. They want to improve that a couple orders of magnitude.

There is a process for urgent observations- for instance if LIGO detects a neutron star merger and locates it in the sky with high precision, JWST might be called upon to interrupt its scheduled observations and look for the optical afterglow…

As excited as we all are, I suspect we will all have our expectations surpassed by what JWST will show us…

I cannot wait to see what it reveals!

Actually, telescope time on all professional scopes is highly booked and prioritized by a network of bureaucratic committees. Every time some supernova or other sudden event demands telescope time, somebody’s research program is usually set back. In most cases, this is just an inconvenience, but in some it could really be a career-killer.

Complex decisions involving the importance, time-criticality and repeatability of an observation must be made, and I suppose mistakes and disputes are common. It must be a lot like being on the organ transplant waiting list.

My question is, is there an override provision? So, say the scope is pointed at something scheduled long before but there is a sudden event that needs looking at. Can they just quickly move it? Or is there a lot more administration work than just “OMG we need to look at that!”

And as incredible as that is, there are even more dramatic advances coming soon that won’t require quite the massive investment JWST did.

The 6.5 meter diameter JWST will achieve a resolution of 0.1 arcseconds (~0.5 microrad), there are missions in planning now that will allow ground telescopes like the 30m telescopes under construction now to operate at essentially their diffraction limit at even shorter visible wavelengths- achieving resolutions over an order of magnitude better, and some advanced Radio telescope missions in planning now are talking about micro-arcsec resolutions!

We are about to see a new revolution in astronomy.