The first image made by the James Webb Space Telescope was released this Friday (11) by the North American Space Agency (NASA). The photograph of the star HD 84406, which belongs to the constellation Ursa Major and is 258 light-years from Earth, was captured by the NIRCam infrared camera.
Launched on December 25th, the James Webb is about to complete the first phase of the main mirror alignment to 18 individual segments. The idea is to align the telescope’s focus, as the region does not count the interference of light from other stars, but the process should still take a few more months.
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Although the image shows 18 smudges of light, it is the same star – with the alignment, a future photo will show the junction of the 18 coupled segments becoming a single star.
Image capture began on February 2, with the telescope positioned at 156 different positions. The process took 25 hours and generated 1,560 photos with NIRCam’s 10 detectors, which generated 54GB of raw material. The images were condensed to form the current mosaic, part of a giant image with more than 2 billion pixels.
“The entire Webb team is ecstatic with the success of the first steps of imaging and aligning the telescope. We were happy to see the light reaching NIRCam,” said Marcia RIeke, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona and principal investigator for NASA’s infrared camera.
Webb even took a blurred “selfie” with a lens installed inside the NIRCam that shows the telescope’s segments, one being illuminated by a star.
In addition to focal alignment, another factor that will make Webb photos sharper is NIRCam working at lower temperatures. The camera will operate at full capacity as long as it operates at its ideal cryogenic temperature.
NASA expects to receive the first scientific images from the telescope by the middle of this year.
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