James Webb Telescope

From the White House on Monday, humanity will gets its first glimpse of what the observatory in space has been seeing — a cluster of galaxies.

Such a spectrum is the sort of detail that could reveal what is in that world’s atmosphere. A small team of astronomers and science outreach experts selected the images to show off the capability of the new telescope and to knock the socks off the public. For the astronomers, engineers and officials watching on Earth, the deployment was a tense time. There were 344 single-point failures, meaning if any of the actions had not worked, the telescope would have ended as useless space junk. The spacecraft has been orbiting the second Lagrange point, or L2, about a million miles from Earth since Jan. 24. - The Journey’s Beginning: When the Webb lifted off, it was the culmination ofdecades of stalled development. The cluster’s enormous gravitation field acts as a lens, warping and magnifying the light from galaxies behind it that would otherwise be too faint and faraway to see. Among the cosmic images are old friends to astronomers both amateur and professional, who now get to see them in new infrared raiments. It includes a massive cluster of galaxies about four billion light-years from here that astronomers use as a kind of cosmic telescope. President Biden is set to unveil a “deep field” image the observatory captured. The New York Times will also provide a live video feed. The largest space telescope ever built is ready to show us what it’s been looking at for the past six months.

On Monday, the first image from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope will be presented to the public.

The James Webb telescope’s ability to see far into the infrared spectrum will afford scientists a clearer view into the deep cosmos than has been possible before. As a result, the telescope requires a massive sun shield to protect against solar radiation. The mirrors, cameras and other instruments that need to be kept ultracold for infrared astronomy are protected from the sun’s radiation by a five-layered, tennis-court-sized sun shield. The Webb can obtain an “ultra deep field” image by focusing on one dark patch of space for a protracted period and gathering the faint light that hits the mirrors. Regardless of whatever wow factor is generated by the new images, the significant fact is that the Webb works. “The capabilities of Webb are truly out of this world.”

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb's First Deep Field, ...

Academics have long petitioned Nasa to rename the space telescope, given historical accusations linking Webb to anti-LGBT policies.

“The observatory will produce amazing science and gorgeous images, certainly the equal of anything Hubble has done,” Plait tweeted. “A lot of astronomers are very unhappy the observatory is named after him,” wrote the American astronomer Phil Plait in his Bad Astronomy newsletter. The telescope’s name has been criticised by many scientists amid allegations that Webb was linked to persecution of LGBTQ+ people in the 1950s and 1960s.

President Joe Biden will share the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope on Monday at the White House at 5 p.m. ET. The rest of Webb's first ...

These will be the first of many images to come from Webb, the most powerful telescope ever launched into space. "Webb can see backwards in time just after the big bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away, the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to ourselves," said Jonathan Gardner, Webb deputy senior project scientist at NASA, during a recent news conference. Webb's study of the giant gas planet WASP-96b will be the first full-color spectrum of an exoplanet. The space telescope's view of Stephan's Quintet will reveal the way galaxies interact with one another. Called gravitational lensing, this will create Webb's first deep field view of incredibly old and distant, faint galaxies. Located 7,600 light-years away, the Carina Nebula is a stellar nursery, where stars are born.

They include an incredibly deep image of the universe and the atmosphere of an exoplanet.

Driving the news: President Biden is expected to unveil the first full-color photo on Monday at 5pm ET, and NASA will release the rest of the images on Tuesday at 10:30am ET. - The first batch will reveal the fine details of star formation, an exoplanet's atmosphere, an incredibly deep image of the universe, a cluster of galaxies and more, according to NASA. NASA is set to release its first full-color scientific images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope Monday and Tuesday.

There are more scenes of the cosmos coming on Tuesday morning from the largest space observatory ever built.

Adam Riess, a Nobel-Prize winning cosmologist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, said the new Webb image had detected objects a trillionth the brightness of the star Vega, a astronomical standard for the magnitude of a star. The cluster’s enormous gravitation field acts as a lens, warping and magnifying the light from galaxies behind it that would otherwise be too faint and faraway to see. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, described this image as the deepest view yet into the past of our cosmos. Webb is expected to smash that record, again and again starting with this image of SMACS 0723. In the first Webb image released by President Biden and NASA yesterday, some of the distant galaxies are warped into curves. Such a spectrum is the sort of detail that could reveal what is in that world’s atmosphere. For the astronomers, engineers and officials watching on Earth, the deployment was a tense time. It includes a massive cluster of galaxies about 4 billion light-years from here that astronomers use as a kind of cosmic telescope. Last week, NASA released another picture taken by the telescope’s fine guidance sensor, a camera meant just to lock on surrounding stars for reference and keep the spacecraft’s science instruments pointed at exactly the right place. In a brief event at the White House on Monday, President Biden and NASA introduced Webb’s first scientific image, which goes by the name of SMACS 0723. It is a patch of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere on Earth and often visited by Hubble and other telescopes in search of the deep past. Starting in the late morning, the agency will reveal a series of images from the largest and most powerful space observatory ever launched.

The James Webb Space Telescope's first images will be shared on Tuesday, including a nebula where stars are born, the color spectrum of an exoplanet and the ...

The space telescope's view of Stephan's Quintet will reveal the way galaxies interact with one another. Webb's study of the giant gas planet WASP-96b will be the first full-color spectrum of an exoplanet. The image, taken by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera, is composed of images taken at different wavelengths of light over a collective 12.5 hours. Located 7,600 light-years away, the Carina Nebula is a stellar nursery, where stars are born. The spectrum will include different wavelengths of light that could reveal new information about the planet, such as whether it has an atmosphere. Called gravitational lensing, this created Webb's first deep field view that includes incredibly old and faint galaxies.

After unveiling the clearest view yet of the distant cosmos, the James Webb Space Telescope has more to come.

Thanks to an efficient launch, NASA estimates Webb has enough propellant for a 20-year life, as it works in concert with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to answer fundamental questions about the cosmos. Launched in December 2021 from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, Webb is orbiting the Sun at a distance of a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, in a region of space called the second Lagrange point. The next wave of images on Tuesday will reveal details about the atmosphere of a faraway gas planet, a " stellar nursery" where stars form, a "quintet" of galaxies locked in a dance of close encounters, and the cloud of gas around a dying star.

The first full-color images from NASA's James Webb telescope have been released, giving us the deepest look into the universe and how the first galaxies ...

Biden to release first-full color image from James Webb telescope A test image taken by the James Webb Telescope offers a preview of what's to come ahead of the release of the first full-color images. - Biden to release first-full color image from James Webb telescope

Analysis: astronomers are hoping future images will show 'cosmic dawn', the forming of the first galaxies 13.5bn years ago.

For researchers, the waves of relief are now waves of excitement: now the real work begins. Webb will do more than look back to the early stirrings of the universe. Against the odds, the observatory made it to the launch pad, reached its destination unscathed, and appears to be operating beautifully. On Tuesday, Nasa will release more images to give a flavour of what the telescope can do. Nasa’s Hubble defined our view of the heavens for the past 30 years, and now Webb, its successor, is poised to shape our understanding for many decades to come. Webb’s impressive performance comes from its remote position in space, a spot 1m miles from Earth called the second Lagrange point, or L2, its large mirror, and the extreme sensitivity of its infrared instruments.

Astronomers and space fans have been waiting years for this moment: The James Webb Space Telescope team has finally made public a handful of stunning images ...

This image of a tight grouping of five galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet shows in detail the first compact galaxy group ever discovered. JWST is able to infer the presence of clouds and hazes around the planet. Many of Hubble’s now-iconic images were also of nebulae, like the Crab Nebula and Horsehead Nebula. WASP-96 is a gas giant about half the size of Jupiter, and is about 1,150 light-years away. The new images provide a taste of what scientists can achieve with the powerful telescope. This is definitely the hors d'oeuvres, and the main course will be coming out over the months and years ahead,” says Jonathan Lunine, a Cornell University astrobiologist on the JWST team.

Thanks to the telescope's deep and sharp infrared images, Earthlings are getting a more detailed look at distant galaxies than was ever possible.

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NASA revealed the first scientific images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The cosmic photos feature fresh looks at galaxies in the deep universe, ...

“We humans really are connected to the Universe. We’re made of the same stuff in this beautiful landscape.” Hundreds of new stars can be seen in this image that scientists hadn’t seen yet, as well as even more violent jets and bubbles caused by baby stars tearing away at the nearby gas and dust. This picture shows the cosmic cliffs of the nebula in stunning detail and color, revealing more detail about this area than ever before. “The gravity of the cluster is distorting and warping our view of what’s behind,” Jane Rigby, operations project scientist for JWST at NASA, said during the briefing. JWST was able to capture the spectrum — or the breakdown of light — filtered through the atmosphere of a planet outside of our Solar System, or an exoplanet. It’s so luminous, in fact, that the resulting glow is 40 billion times as bright as that of our Sun. They’re so massive that they warp space and time around them, creating a lensing effect that magnifies the galaxies in the background. By stripping away that light, we see a surprise shining bright in the center of the top galaxy. in the atmosphere of this specific exoplanet,” Knicole Colon, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said during a briefing today on the spectrum. Today’s images each showcase an exciting ability of the observatory — and they’re only a jumping-off point of what’s to come. NASA hailed the image as the deepest infrared image of the Universe ever taken. Yesterday, NASA announced that it had officially finished calibrating JWST’s various instruments and testing out all of its different operating modes, meaning the observatory and its tools have all been deemed ready to start collecting data.

They'll mark the beginning of the next era in astronomy as Webb – the largest space telescope ever built – offers scientific data that will help answer ...

After July 12, the James Webb Space Telescope will start working full time on its science mission. On July 12, NASA plans to release a suite of teaser observations that illustrate Webb’s capabilities. As of June 15, 2022, all of Webb’s instruments are on and have taken their first images. Once NIRCam cooled to minus 280 F, it was cold enough to start detecting light reflecting off of Webb’s mirror segments and produce the telescope’s first images. The extremely cold temperatures allow MIRI to be incredibly sensitive to light in the mid-infrared range which can pass through dust more easily. The NIRCam team was ecstatic when the first light image arrived. The first task during Webb’s monthlong journey to its final location in orbit was to unfold the telescope. One of the first things my colleagues at NASA noticed was that the telescope had more remaining fuel onboard than predicted to make future adjustments to its orbit. NASA is scheduled to release some of the very first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on July 12, 2022. Future steps will measure exactly where the slits are pointing and check that multiple targets can be observed simultaneously. But before it could do that, NIRCam had to help align the 18 individual segments of Webb’s mirror. But it has taken nearly eight months of travel, setup, testing and calibration to make sure this most valuable of telescopes is ready for prime time.

Among the newly released images are breathtaking views of a distant galaxy group called Stephan's Quintet that was discovered in 1877.

Researchers have said that Webb could unlock mysteries from as far back as 100 million years after the Big Bang — observations that could help astronomers understand how the modern universe came to be. As such, the telescope is expected to provide first-of-its-kind infrared views of the universe, and capture some never-before-seen cosmic objects. Scientists have said the observatory, which will be able to see deeper into space and in greater detail than any telescope that has come before it, could revolutionize human understanding of the universe.

The first full-color image released Monday marked the official beginning of Webb's general science operations. Using infrared wavelengths, the Webb telescope ...

The first full-color image released Monday marked the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations. Tuesday, NASA released "the deepest and sharpest" images of the distant universe from the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA releases 'sharpest' images of the universe from James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Telescope is named after a NASA administrator alleged to be complicit in the discrimination of LGBTQ employees in the mid-20th century.

It could also serve as a reminder that the night sky is a shared heritage that belongs to all of us, including LGBTQIA+ people." NASA released the first, highly-anticipated deep space images from its James Webb Space Telescope this week. "As one of the people who has been leading the push to change the name, today feels bittersweet. The researchers pointed to former NASA employee Clifford L. Norton, who was fired in 1963 under Webb's administration. In 2002, when the then-NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced the James Webb name, he said that "It is fitting that Hubble's successor be named in honor of James Webb," as Webb had "laid the foundations at NASA for one of the most successful periods of astronomical discovery," according to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope website. Outraged astronomers, researchers and more have called on NASA to rename the James Webb Telescope – with over 1,700 signing a petition created in 2021 demanding for the removal of Webb's name from the "next-generation space telescope."

The first photos from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have been released. Here's everything you need to know about space's hottest new photographer.

The Webb telescope cost $10 billion. NASA's website describes Webb as the government official who did more for science than perhaps any other and a fitting recipient to be the namesake of the Next Generation Space Telescope. The James Webb telescope is designed to capture light 100 times fainter than that captured by Hubble. As for the planets in our own solar system – the Webb telescope can see those too, of course. The telescope looks back in time using gravitational lensing. They are seen in part because the James Webb Telescope targeted a cluster called SMACS 0723, which has a gravitational field so strong it magnifies the light of older, more distant galaxies.

A "stellar nursery" and a "cosmic dance" are among James Webb's first batch of colour images.

Astronomers refer here to a "cosmic reef", or "cosmic cliff" - a kind of broad demarcation between dust in the bottom half, and then gas in the top half. But this treasure trove comes from only a few days of observations, and so far the telescope's only looked at a minute fraction of the sky. Key partners on the Webb project are the European and Canadian space agencies. And this was the great hope - that we would have Webb working alongside Hubble. They have different strengths and being able to compare and contrast will give scientists a new dimension to their studies. These first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are jaw-dropping. But the officials at Nasa who are in charge of the old warhorse have just submitted a five-year budget plan. Except in this Webb image, we not only see the stars - our eyes are drawn to all that gas and the dust. The Southern Ring, or "Eight-Burst" nebula, is a giant expanding sphere of gas and dust that's been lit up by a dying star in the centre. This Webb image doesn't look that different from the Hubble version at first glance, but the new telescope's infrared sensitivity will pull out different features for astronomers to study. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. Everywhere you see a red arc-like structure - that's something - a galaxy - way off in the distance and far further back in time. It's known to astronomers as a "gravitational lens" because the mass of the cluster bends and magnifies the light of objects that are much further away.

Much-anticipated images from Hubble's successor show, in brilliant and startling detail, far corners of the unseen universe.

We're going to answer so many questions and then, of course, we're going to have more questions that we never dreamed of. "From a scientific perspective, there is something about humanity that just really wants to know about where we are and to where we came from," LaMassa says. Just being involved in seeing all these different subsystems that need to work together—having 18 different individual mirror segments working as one—for all the instruments getting initial data and starting to process it and getting things working to the point where we could take these amazing images," she says. The space telescope, Hubble's successor, will be able to see back in time, capturing images such as the first galaxies that formed after the big bang, and will offer much-more-detailed views of nebulas and star systems in the distant universe. "And so, we're really seeing for the first time what galaxies looked like in the early universe." But an endeavor doesn't get any more cosmic than that of the $9.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which in December launched on a journey 1 million miles from Earth and today released its first batch of images from space.

Spectacular imagery from the largest-ever space telescope brought tears to the eyes of seasoned scientists and dazzled the public.

As the Goddard ceremony wrapped up on Tuesday, Dr. Zurbuchen and Dr. Mather took the stage to congratulate and praise the team that had worked together so long and well. The mirror also proved to be twice as good as expected at detecting the shortest wavelengths of light, increasing the telescope’s resolving power. So too is the radiation from carbon, ozone and other molecules that are of keen interest to astrobiologists. But all the challenges of developing and building the instrument remained. On Thursday, all the data gathered during the testing of the telescope and its instruments will become available. A few miles away at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, an overflow crowd of astronomers whooped and hollered, oohed and aahed, as new images flashed on the screen — evidence that their telescope was working even better than hoped. It is a collaboration among NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. - The Journey’s Beginning: When the Webb lifted off, it was the culmination ofdecades of stalled development. The farther away a star or galaxy lies, the older it is, making every telescope a kind of time machine. Hints of water vapor in the atmosphere of a remote exoplanet. “That was always out there,” said Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the telescope’s operations manager. The universe was born in darkness 13.8 billion years ago, and even after the first stars and galaxies blazed into existence a few hundred million years later, these too stayed dark.

More than six months after initially launching to space in December 2021, the James Webb telescope shed new light on humankind's scientific understanding of ...

The dimmer, dying star is expelling gas and dust that Webb sees through in unprecedented detail: https://t.co/tlougFWg8B #UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/yOMMmQcAfA July 12, 2022 It aimed to study each phase of our universe’s history as part of an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. “As the pair continues to orbit one another, they ‘stir the pot’ of gas and dust, causing asymmetrical patterns,” wrote NASA. “Each shell represents an episode where the fainter star lost some of its mass. The “Cosmic Cliffs” build on the legacy of Hubble’s imagery of the Carina Nebula, seen here. Compare the new image to— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) @NASAHubble’s 2009 view, shown here! In the below-displayed tweet, the right image showed a star that is surrounded by dust. The light was stretched by the expansion of the universe to infrared wavelengths that Webb was designed to observe,” wrote NASA. “Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. On July 11, UX designer Jason Short created and shared a GIF showing the differences between the two images: It’s just a tiny sliver of the vast universe,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during an unveiling event at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The White House and NASA gave a sneak peek of the telescopic discovery the day prior, when U.S. President Joe Biden released a first-of-its-kind infrared image at a press briefing. On July 12, 2022, NASA revealed stunningly in-depth images captured by the telescope, giving us a new look at areas of our universe as they appeared billions of years ago.

The splendors of the universe glowed in a new batch of images released Tuesday from NASA's powerful new James Webb telescope.

This is so so beautiful,” Thomas Zurbuchen, chief of NASA’s science missions, said after the event. It showed water vapor in the super-hot planet’s atmosphere and even found the chemical spectrum of neon. Instead of an image, the telescope used its infrared detectors to look at the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere. — Southern Ring nebula, which is sometimes called “eight-burst.” Images show a dying star with a foamy edge of escaping gas. “It’s the story of where did we come from?” A foamy blue and orange view of a dying star.

NASA says its extended inquiry into what Webb's role might've been in homophobic government policies is complete, an update is coming, and the name stays.

"Memorialization is important because it expresses a nation's values," Szkody said in the follow-up letter. American Astronomical Society President Paula Szkody sent a letter to Nelson in November requesting a public and formal report on the investigation and calling for a more inclusive naming process. "On the specific allegations against Webb the evidence is clear," Oluseyi concluded. "The records clearly show that Webb planned and participated in meetings during which he handed over homophobic material," the column reads. In May 2021, four astronomers circulated a petition that gathered more than 1,700 signatures from scientists and others calling for the telescope to be renamed. James Webb was NASA administrator, the agency's highest-ranking official, from 1961 until 1968, shepherding the agency through a golden era, including much of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Images of five targets showcase the most distant objects ever observed in outer space.

In the mid-infrared image on the right, we can see the white dwarf more clearly, surrounded by dust, a view made possible because of the power of JWST’s instruments. The gravitational interactions pull broad trails of gas and dust away from the galaxies, and Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) shows huge shockwaves as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318 B, slams through the cluster. This massive landscape of cosmic mountains and valleys in the Carina Nebula is known as the “Cosmic Cliffs.” Here the bubbles, cavities, and jets of newborn stars are made visible through the dust in a way that was impossible when the Hubble Space Telescope imaged this region of intense star formation. This pair of images of the Southern Ring Nebula shows two powerful perspectives on the same binary star system, a white dwarf and its younger counterpart. The youngest stars appear as red dots in the darker areas of the dust cloud; others are emitting ‘protostellar’ jets typical of early star birth. The space telescope, a project 30 years in the making, launched in December 2021 and arrived at its destination point in January. After a lengthy “unfolding” process, JWST turned its 21-foot mirror on the stars.

The first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been released by NASA, following an initial reveal by US President Joe Biden.

JWST’s view of the galaxies in infrared light shows as never before how those interactions are driving the formation of stars inside the galaxies. First up might be the diabetes drug metformin. The power of JWST’s optics are so great that individual stars can even be seen inside the galaxies. One of those observations was a detailed study of the atmosphere of a gas giant planet 1,000 light-years from Earth, called WASP-96 b. Countless more stunning vistas and copious amounts of invaluable data are set to come our way. JWST’s stunning first science image, which was unveiled by Biden on Monday, is a deep view into the universe showing thousands of galaxies, showcasing the immense power of the $10 billion telescope.

A GIF comparing the new James Webb Telescope image with a previous image from the RELICS Treasury Program has gone viral on Twitter.

Tweet may have been deleted (opens in a new tab) Tweet may have been deleted (opens in a new tab) The image, revealed by President Joe Biden at the White House, is objectively stunning, giving a view of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 — a galaxy in distant deep space — as it looked over 4.5 billion years ago.

'Ultimate Space Telescope' explores the teamwork it took to get Webb into space and ready for science.

A follow-up documentary about Webb's early discoveries will premiere on NOVA in 2023, PBS added. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey devastated the city of Houston, severely impairing the scientists' access to power and electricity just as they were putting the telescope through a crucial set of tests — yet, they were able to persevere." Since Webb is optimized to study objects in infrared light, it will shed new information on these galaxies. "As astronomers scoured the Hubble deep field, they noticed strange, red amorphous galaxies," PBS said of one of the set of multi-day images. "Originally scheduled to launch in 2007, [Webb] was met with a number of delays," PBS stated. — James Webb Space Telescope: The engineering behind a 'first light machine' that is not allowed to fail

NASA revealed that the James Webb Space Telescope detected the "distinct signature of water" on a hazy exoplanet 1150 light-years away.

"This NIRISS observation demonstrates that Webb has the power to characterize the atmospheres of exoplanets — including those of potentially habitable planets — in exquisite detail," NASA said. "Each molecule has a specific diet," explained Néstor Espinoza, an exoplanet researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs theJames Webb Space Telescope. The spectrograph produces lines (designating different types of light), not pretty pictures; but it's a wealth of invaluable information. This particular world, dubbed WASP-96 b, is nothing like Earth. It's a type of planet called a "hot Jupiter" that doesn't exist in our solar system. It's not the first detection of water molecules on another world. Instead, the instrument can detect what the atmospheres of extremely distant exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system, are composed of.

All these distinct lights are contained in a tiny speck of space. How tiny? Scientists proposed this way of envisioning: Take a single grain of sand, hold it ...

For the farther we see, the humbler we become, and the fruit of humility is gratitude. We turn steadily around a small but reliable star, and were it not for the problems we cause ourselves, we would live in a near utopia. It’s not too much to say that a handful of images published over the space of 24 hours has already justified the decades of work and $10 billion invested in the Webb telescope. This is Hubble on steroids, the closest humans have yet come to glimpsing the true dimensions and inner workings of the universe. The word gets tossed around a lot, but the scale of it is not easily grasped. That is the speck of space Webb looked at to acquire its first observation.

NASA reveals five stunning images from the deep space telescope nearly 7 months after its launch.

Scientists all over the world will study the images Webb captures and perhaps find answers to questions about the early years of the universe. The Webb telescope will explore four areas of science: early universe, galaxies over time, the star life cycle and other worlds. As a result, the telescope requires a massive sun shield to protect against solar radiation.

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 ...

“I just felt overwhelmed,” said Joe Depasquale, the lead image processor on the project, describing what it had felt like to see one scene of another star-forming nebula come together — something with a more Caravaggio-esque, light-and-shadow effect that wasn’t included in the initial batch of releases. After half an hour of focus on the Carina nebula image, the participants in the early June meeting shifted their attentions to another observation that was also held back from Tuesday’s initial releases. 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. Before coloring in the cosmos, though, astronomers had to come up with what to do right after the most powerful set of eyes ever produced had fluttered open for the first time. The Hubble color palette isn’t fussy about matching an exact wavelength that the telescope saw to the exact color it would appear as in human eyes. In parallel, image processors working with Hubble data adopted a color palette that soon came to dominate the wider world of deep cosmic photography. Engineers and image processors also adopted new conventions that have recurred in fictional and real-world depictions of the cosmos ever since. Even reaching this point had taken decades of planning, threatened cancellations, delays upon delays, a pandemic and a round of harrowing reverse origami that was needed to unfold the telescope in deep space without breaking it. Just days later, Time and Life magazines ran the photo alongside poetry, and when the U.S. Postal Service reprinted it on a stamp, it kept a matching quote: the first words of Genesis, which the astronauts had read back to listeners on Earth as they circled the moon. For six weeks, this group — a mix of astronomers, press officers and science communicators — raced to assemble an early highlight reel for the $10 billion space observatory, launched on Christmas Day last year. Much of that is because the Webb operates in infrared wavelengths. This is full of jets!” — at the crisp, hallucinatory grandeur of new stars sprouting from a nebula like seeds from a flower bed.

Astronomers around the world anxiously await their opportunity to pore over the data gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope.

People are going to use lots of different techniques to get as much science as they can out of the data." "And so they get priority, because we want the community to have as much data available, in particular by the time they get to propose again." "Those data will be released to the principal investigators of those programs in the next day or two, and some of them are public," he said. Making that data available to the public as the program continues will be key to unlocking new discoveries, he noted. The telescope contains four different instruments that can combine to collect data in 17 different modes. "The first year of science observations have already begun.