There was no way to tell from yesterday’s White House press conference release of the first JWST “sea of galaxies” image whether it was any better or different from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) views of the same region.

In my opinion, this was a missed opportunity to wow the public.

But since then, amateur astronomer Nicholas Eggleston has stepped up with an overlay of the two telescopes’ images, aligned to view the same region. We all know how wonderful the HST views have been, even resolving individual stars in the distant Andromeda galaxy. Well, the James Webb Space Telescope (in addition to being infrared) has now demonstrated its resolution blows HST away. Check out the light arcs due to gravitational lensing (click on his page link so you can use the slider functionality, which probably won’t work on smart phones):

http://www.nicholaseggleston.com/JamesWebbHubble/index.htm

If you cannot see the 2 images with a slider separating them, here is an animated GIF I put together:

If you want higher resolution, right-click the animated GIF and download it (“Save image as…”) to your desktop. Then you can view it at full resolution.