Originally published at: Spectacular image of a distant star captured by new Webb telescope during alignment milestone | Boing Boing
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Blimey, space is deep. 
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Look at all those tilted galaxies. If there’s any life out there, it’s always going uphill and downhill. Makes you glad our galaxy is nice and level.
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All that work for some lovely lens flare that would make JJ Abrams jealous…
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The Outer Rim will never be the same.
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They say that, as Webb’s optics are geared for infra-red, we should not expect the kind of pic banquet we got with HST. Looking at this I’d say they are wrong-wrong-wrong, and I’m salivating in anticipation. Mmmmm galaxies, gimme gimme…
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I really wish that NASA would tell us how many seconds or minutes or hours that exposure represents, so we could have some idea of the sensitivity of this telescope/camera.
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Lens flare? That’s mirror flare.
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It’s pretty is what it is.
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I knew that my son’s godmother was involved with this project but it wasn’t until I saw her quoted in a news story today that I learned she’s the Operations Project Scientist for the whole shebang! So I guess let me know if there’s something cool you want the telescope to point at and I’ll see if she can make that happen?
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Man i feel sorry for Hubble, old and being put out to pasture with everyone going crazy over the new pony.
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That only matters to those that live on the rim.
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Maybe now we’ll finally know the answer to riddle of the smiling galaxy. 
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I liked this excerpt from the NASA website that describes the fine-phasing alignment:
To work together as a single mirror, the telescope’s 18 primary mirror segments need to match each other to a fraction of a wavelength of light – approximately 50 nanometers. To put this in perspective, if the Webb primary mirror were the size of the United States, each segment would be the size of Texas, and the team would need to line the height of those Texas-sized segments up with each other to an accuracy of about 1.5 inches.
Neat! When I put up drywall I’m lucky if the sheets are aligned to with 1/4" of each other!
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Nice and level, but it’s warped at the edges. Like an LP someone left in the car.
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Whoever is saying that needs to look at this. Eagle nebula in visible light (left) and infrared (right). I mean, we knew it was a star-forming region, but wow wow wow…
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I found the exposure time is 35 minutes, in an article in Universe Today. Yay!
“Feinberg said the image is a 2,100 second exposure”
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“Pillars of Creation” some call it, and those “fingers” are light years wide.
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