"During the Apollo era... NASA flooded the public domain with views of both the astronauts themselves and photographs taken by the astronauts."

"One goal was bottling wonder.... In the decades after Apollo funding evaporated, a new visual culture emerged from NASA missions connected to the Jet Propulsion Lab in California and a cohort of Hollywood-adjacent scientists like Carl Sagan. They promoted a new rationale for wandering into the expanse for the sake of intellectual curiosity, not just to beat the Russians."

Yet President Biden remained grounded in the old rationale. He said: "These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things."

I'm reading "The Lonely Work of Picking the Universe’s Best Astronomy Pictures/In June, specialists gathered in Baltimore to select images from the James Webb Space Telescope to share with the public. Keeping the results to themselves hasn’t been easy" by Joshua Sokol in the NYT.

In the new rationale, we don't get a flood of photographs. We get a slow succession of carefully chosen, heavily processed images.

The news media and politicians were invited to galas to see eagerly anticipated first glimpses of other planets, beamed back like postcards from sightseeing drives through the solar system. In this era, at the inception of digital imagery, engineers on missions like Voyager often experimented with combining multi-wavelength data into pictures with ultra-vivid hues, said Elizabeth Kessler, a historian of visual culture at Stanford. "They just look like throbbing, shifting, morphing, psychedelic colors," she said.... 

In 2016, a committee of representatives from the Space Telescope Science Institute, NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies convened to start choosing Webb’s very first demo targets. They checked off boxes that vibed with the telescope’s scientific goals: a deeper-than-ever deep field, galaxies pulsing in the void like jellyfish, a star with an attendant exoplanet, star-forming regions like the Carina Nebula and more.... 

Stars in Webb images have six points, unlike the four spikes common in most space photography, a quirk that emerges from the quantum mumbo-jumbo of how incoming photons lap against this telescope’s structure and are then gathered up by its hexagonal mirrors. In particular wavelengths.... clouds that would otherwise look diffuse seem to have hard soap-bubble surfaces, skins of interstellar gas that are absorbing ultraviolet light from nearby stars and shining it back into space as infrared radiation. And in the mid-infrared, when space itself looks afire because of glowing molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced by aging stars, colors again get wonky. 'We end up having psychedelic purple clouds'.... 

Will anything land as hard as the Apollo shots?

Part of the science is the science of our emotions and how to manipulate them with images. We are expected to gape and gasp "wow." Color is big. The word psychedelic keeps coming up. Composition matters. They choose to put solid-looking "vaguely geologic structures" at the bottom to mentally orient us in something that feels like a landscape:

Think 19th-century paintings from surveys of the Western frontier, the photography of Ansel Adams, background scenery in countless Westerns — or El Capitan, from Yosemite National Park, looming in the desktop background of a Mac computer.

They are hoping this will "land as hard as the Apollo shots." I remember how Apollo interfaced with the public. I was a skeptic at the time. I'm quick to feel the manipulation and resist. I'm not saying the science isn't worthy, only that what we are getting is a show about science.