THE WEBB TELESCOPE IMAGES "EYE CANDY" TO ASTRONOMERS

(Left) The Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared view of the Pillars of Creation, which showcases the telescope’s ability to detect dust, a major ingredient in star formation.Credit...NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

(Right) Deep in a cloud of dust and gas, a star is being born. At the center of the hourglass light from a spinning shrinking protostar leaks out the top and bottom of a thick disc of matter feeding it and illuminates surrounding gas and dust clouds.Credit...NASA, Esa, Csa, and Stsci, J. Depasquale (Stsci)

(Left) The Cosmic Cliffs, a region on the edge of the gigantic, gaseous Carina Nebula, as seen by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera.Credit...NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

(Right) Annotated views of the Cosmic Cliffs, indicating some of Megan Reiter’s observations. Credit...NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

By Dennis Overbye
New York Times

BALTIMORE — So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope.

The telescope, named for James Webb, the NASA administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. It was launched on Christmas one year ago — after two trouble-plagued decades and $10 billion — on a mission to observe the universe in wavelengths no human eye can see. With a primary mirror 21 feet wide, the Webb is seven times as powerful as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. Depending on how you do the accounting, one hour of observing time on the telescope can cost NASA $19,000 or more.

But neither NASA nor the astronomers paid all that money and political capital just for pretty pictures — not that anyone is complaining.

“The first images were just the beginning,” said Nancy Levenson, temporary director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs both Webb and the Hubble. “More is needed to turn them into real science.”

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