Originally published at: Here are the first star images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and a bonus space selfie | Boing Boing
…
10 Likes
The only thing more ridiculous than the success of the mission to date is the ridiculous procedure to come as they focus and stack the images from the separate mirrors, and the only thing more ridiculous than that is that it’s going to actually work.
20 Likes
I’m glad that his picture was released. I had recently read that the JWST team were reluctant to publish such images because the masses would say that the telescope was a colossal waste of money, as the image looks horrible by astronomical standards.
But it looks beautiful by engineering standards.
24 Likes
What a Wonderous Webb we weave, when at first we practice to perceive…
I can’t wait for the first focused images 
13 Likes
Way back in the seventies, my dad worked on the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) in Arizona, which was the first big telescope to have many mirrors that needed alignment. They eventually abandoned the first laser alignment system that he helped to develop, as it wasn’t very reliable due to moths and such. The next system used star images as the JWST is using. (It was harder back then, as digital imaging devices were still in their infancy.)
They learned a lot from that telescope, but eventually replaced its six mirrors with a single mirror because they could.
17 Likes
11 Likes
It’s worth a reminder that Hubble’s first image was:
in May 1990.
With in a couple years it was doing this sort of thing:
Hopefully the public can hang tight for a bit.
24 Likes
Well, at least this time they confirmed the mirrors were ground correctly before launch, right? Something tells me that NASA wouldn’t be getting a budget to send astronauts to L2 to fix it.
9 Likes
That’s a nice, tight grouping right thar, cowboy!
1 Like
You laugh, but there is a service mission in the works. Most likely robotic, but in 10+ years, who knows? The thing that will be sorely missing is the Space Shuttle, which was amazing for this kind of thing. It was basically a pickup truck full of tools, with a great workspace to get things done. Servicing missions in the future may be a lot more complicated without a manipulator arm, or a cargo bay to easily access materials and keep things contained.
6 Likes
4 Likes
I’m on tenterhooks, waiting for this to all be smoothly up and running. What wonders we shall see. 
2 Likes
4 Likes
Oh yes. My wife and I did a lot of industrial commissioning work; we’re quite used to those first baby-steps, how unimpressive it seems at first, and those tuning and calibration steps that make amazing things happen.
This looks really exciting to us. We are squeeing over this.
we can’t give the jwst a new pair of eyeglasses.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
