The story of space exploration is written one lifetime and one spacecraft at a time. The Parker Solar Probe is in the middle of its exciting solar exploration. The Hubble Space Telescope is somehow hanging on at an age none of us expected it would ever see. At the same time, the JWST is just coming to life.

On March 16, NASA released the first image from JWST that began to hint at what this mission is going to be able to do. In this image, the very red star 2MASS J17554042+6551277 is brought into focus. With a V magnitude of about 11, this star can be seen in a good backyard telescope with a camera. What can’t be seen without a massive telescope are all the fuzzy galaxies that fill the background of this image.

The six thick diffraction spikes are a combination of the three-strut secondary mirror holder and the angled edges of the primary mirror. The two smaller spikes in the middle are from the center strut which is straight up and down, not angled like the other two.

Early comparison between galaxies in the JWST field and images by the Dark Energy Camera with the four-meter Blanco telescope in Chile show that putting a 6.5-meter telescope above our atmosphere is indeed going to give us a sharp new view of the universe. We are still several months from JWST being used for research, but it is looking like this telescope will have arrived very late but with fabulous potential for science.

More Information

NASA press release