Surely, you’ve heard of the Hubble Telescope before?
If you have happened to see those incredible deep space images, there is every chance that they were taken from the Hubble Telescope orbiting high above the Earth at 447 km away.
Now, get ready for an experience of greater proportions from the JWT (James Webb Telescope) launched on Christmas day 2021. It has taken a considerable amount of time to get the telescope into the right orbiting spot of 1.5 million km away.
Considerable care needs to happen in space while this US10 billion telescope unravels itself remotely and the considerable amount of collimation of the 18 hexagonal mirrors. Already there have been early reports of damage from small debris impacts damaging the lower third mirror. The continuous collimation at times will compensate for that type of damage.
The JWT has already sent through some test images of what we can expect to see, the sensor needs to be fine tuned as it can’t bring us the intensity of some stars, and so you will notice on the image below, black spots are appearing. This over time will be adjusted to bring us incredible detail.
showing an incredible view of galaxies we have never seen!
On July 12th 2022, social media lit up with excitement and uproar over the first round of images as we were looking at 4.5 billion light years back in time.
President Biden, was the one who revealed the exciting results to the world. As some of the theories of Space-time and Gravitational lensing were proven in that very first image.
NGC 3132
More information about the James Webb telescope can be found here.
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/
Can I get images this good from home?
The short answer is well, almost… You can achieve similar results from your very own backyard with the right combination of Telescope, Camera, Filters and the right processing techniques. All of this equipment is what we sell and specialise in, at Optics Central.
If you would like to know more contact our Astrophotographer and he will spend some time with you, discussing what you will need to achieve outstanding results, he has examples of his own work to show you and the techniques involved in processing your images.