wait, you did take the lens cap off…right?
As careers go, James Webb didn't have a bad one!
In charge of NASA during the 60s and overseeing the Mercury, Gemini and early Apollo programmes is not a bad list of things to put on your CV.
And when it came time to name the "successor" to the Hubble space telescope, his name was put to the, erm, James Webb Space Telescope.
I've just watched an excellent BBC "Horizon" documentary about the telescope and was fascinated from the first to the last seconds of it. Its deployment didn't go without a hitch though, and it was feared the whole thing would be rendered useless until they realised they'd not unfurled some sort of protective reflector - akin to leaving the lens cap on!
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| 1: lens cap 2: do NOT touch this 3: intergalactic bass guitar |
It's kind of hard though to get your head around the science though. I mean, when you look at the computer you're reading this on it's here with you - in space and time. The light reflecting off it hits your eyes within the shortest period of time imaginable.
Contrast that with the longest period imaginable in the cases of the stars and galaxies the JWST reveals to us. Light that has taken billions of years to reach the telescope's cameras from objects that in many cases are no longer in existence means we're seeing things that are no longer there. But their historic light is. It's simply mind blowing.
I urge you to seek out the images that NASA has published and bookmark the page so you can go back when it's updated with new stuff.
You will be amazed.
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I know I said I was taking a short YouTube holiday, but I got so lucky with my camera over the past day or so and got nine images I'm really proud of. If you want to have a look at them (go on, you do really, don't you) just click below:
We watched that documentary too! Fascinating! (nice pics, BTW!)
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