The revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope has already taken its first image as it lines up to view the oldest objects and events in the universe. As we had been told by NASA, the first images are and will be very unspectacular, because they are part of the required instrument calibration exercise. The visuals won’t be worthy of Webb until that three-month alignment phase is complete.
The subject of the photo, HD 84406, is a bright star in the constellation Ursa Major. In the night sky, it appears just to the right of the constellation Ursa Major.
What appears to be a simple blur of starlight becomes the basis for aligning and focusing the telescope so that Webb will give us unprecedented views of the universe this summer. Over the next month, the team will gradually adjust the mirror segments until all 18 images become a single star.
“The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of imaging and aligning the telescope are going. We were so happy to see the light reaching NIRCam,” Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the NIRCam instrument and regents professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said in a press release.
Webb just opened his eyes
NASA said that during the imaging process, which began on February 2, Webb was redirected to 156 different positions around the star’s predicted location and generated 1,560 images using NIRCam’s 10 detectors, equivalent to 54 gigabytes of raw data. A process that lasted about 25 hours, but managed to locate the target star in each of the mirror segments within the first six hours and 16 exposures.
The posted images are just one part of that larger mosaic, a huge image with more than 2 billion pixels.
In the future, Webb’s images will become clearer, more detailed, and more complex as its other three instruments begin to capture data, as the mirrors focus and tilt to work together as a single mirror.
The telescope spent most of January 2022 slowly unfolding on its way to the second Lagrange point (L2), an area of gravity balanced between the sun and Earth where it will remain for a decade.
Referencia: NASA James Webb Telescope
