Why the galaxy pictures from the Webb telescope are pretty cool

The first public picture from the James Webb telescope is kind of cool and all, but you can’t fully appreciate it unless you know what those glowing blobs represent and how they came to be. For Washington Post Opinion, Sergio Peçanha provides context for why NASA’s recent accomplishment is so awesome:

Everything about the Webb telescope is mind-boggling. Ponder this: Humans sent a telescope the size of a tennis court into space and parked it four times farther away than the moon.

There it orbits the sun along with us, just so we can get some pictures.

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A lot of galaxies

NASA released an image from the Webb First Deep Field telescope, which shows a whole lot of galaxies:

Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.

We are tiny specks.

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Launching a telescope to explore the Big Bang

NASA is launching the James Webb Space Telescope on December 22, 2021 with an objective to collect data on light from 13.8 billion light-years away.

Using 3-D models from NASA, Rahul Mukherjee and Lorena Iñiguez Elebee for The Los Angeles Times show how the $10 billion telescope works and how NASA plans to launch the telescope into orbit a million miles from Earth. Nothing to it.

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