After a solid decade of delays, the folks at NASA are more than a little excited about the data coming out of the JWST. The first fully processed science data is slated to be released on July 12 at 10 am Eastern. We will be doing a watch party on our Twitch channel, CosmoQuestX.

While most folks are keeping everything hush-hush, there are some – I assume authorized – leaks, including a new image from JWST’s fine guidance sensor. A newly released image was built from the guide camera’s data as the camera worked to verify the telescope stayed on target. It is unclear exactly what JWST was studying, but it spent 32 hours pointed such that its fine guidance camera captured the sky near the star 2MASS 16235798+2826079. Based on how the released image appears to be mosaiced together with slightly different pointings, I am going to predict that JWST took a series of images of something that we’ll see on July 12.

The remarkable thing here is this image from the guide camera is now the deepest image of the universe that has ever been taken. It’s deeper than the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, and while it contains a few stars, it is mostly galaxies — and mostly ancient galaxies shining faintly from the early universe. This is like taking family portraits with your car’s backup camera; you can, but that camera really isn’t designed to take great photos. JWST is the high-res camera you want to be using, and with rumors of scientists just breaking into tears the first time they see JWST’s images, we can only imagine that the images are better than anything we can imagine.

Soon we will know what this telescope has to show.

More Information

Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor Provides a Preview (NASA)