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S03:E03
Five spectral cubes, where time runs along the spectrum.
These are not photographs. Each is a stack of thousands of images of the same patch of sky, one for every colour the instrument can separate. The subtraction is the same as in episode one, but the scan now moves along the colour axis, so travelling through a piece is travelling through the spectrum. What you are listening for is where in that spectrum a field stops being its own mirror.
A protostellar jet, a lensed arc, a quasar host, an edge-on disc, and the core of a ring galaxy. One gain across all five, so the quieter pieces are the cubes that kept more of themselves. The ring galaxy comes in roughly twenty decibels below the jet, and that ordering is not brightness.
A sixth cube was rendered for this programme and left out of it: it comes back silent under every scale the instrument offers, because its residual lives in a handful of pixels and this mapping listens to averages. A mapping’s blind spot is a fact for the notebook rather than a movement.
Source: JWST NIRSpec IFU, programs 1257, 2484, 2457, 1621 and 2727.
A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 4m31s in total, the longest stretch 2m24s. Nothing is wrong with the file.
The silence is the recording. Each piece here is a subtraction: two files put on one scale and taken away from each other, with agreement rendered as silence. Where you hear nothing, the two files agreed.