It is apparently a week for researchers to share the weird and awesome things they have done with their space-based cameras. From stunning images of Martian spring, we now turn to a really boring Gaia image of a starfield that just happens to catch the JWST hanging out among the stars.

Both Gaia and JWST are located at Lagrange 2 (L2), a gravitational sweet spot where the pulls of the Earth and Sun keep missions in place as they pace Earth around the Sun. This isn’t an entirely stable point, and spacecraft actually orbit around this point, using engines to keep themselves balanced in this region.

Currently, Gaia, JWST, and the Spektr-RG X-ray observatory all share L2. On Feb 18, Gaia and JWST were just one million kilometers apart, and JWST passed into the narrow stripe of the sky that Gaia is imaging. The telescope is actually programmed to throw out data from objects that don’t match the science needs of its researchers, and JWST isn’t exactly the kind of thing Gaia is meant to look at, but the team of humans behind Gaia decided to change its behavior just this one time.

And it is strangely exciting to know that a tiny dot in a fairly boring image is a telescope that just might one day reveal the story of galaxy formation in the early universe.

More Information

ESA press release