![]() ![]() And so you have this interesting stretching in space-time that happens." They're glowing in all kinds of light, but the further away you go from a galaxy, the longer it takes that light to reach you. "What's really fascinating is the light that you see from distant galaxies in space. ![]() "The JWST is focused on a kind of light called infrared light, which I like to describe as a kind of heat vision as it's thermal light," Hutchison continued. The NASA astrophysicist explained what is that makes the JWST so adept at visualizing these early galaxies. Some of these existed just 300,000 to 500,00 years after the Big Bang. The current limit of the JWST's vision has allowed astronomers to see light that has been traveling for around 13.4 billion years to reach us, meaning astronomers are catching glimpses of the earliest galaxies ever seen. "I think that's probably the most exciting part to me we're continuing to push the limits of how much further we can go and how much we can push this telescope to see as far as it possibly can." And one of them happened to be trying to look back in time, as far as we possibly can, to see some of these first galaxies that ever formed," Hutchison said. I assume that the Ariane stage does something similar."NASA put out four science goals for this observatory. The Centaurs also do propellant dumps which can be interesting to watch. I’ve imaged Centaur upper stages at ranges of more than 700,000 km and the Falcon 9 upper stage at 400,000km but the Ariane upper stage is smaller I think. I don’t know how bright the upper stage will be but on the first few nights I would expect it would be detectable and fairly close to the spacecraft. There is another course correction burn scheduled for L+60h. JWST is directly injected into a transfer orbit to L2 so the upper stage will probably be close by but it will probably do some form of deflection burn and JWST itself will do its first course correction at L+12.5h so the two will drift apart. There’s not much detail available about what will happen to the cryogenic upper stage following JWST separation which occurs at around 30 minutes after launch. Winter is definitely good for us in the northern hemisphere since L2 is currently high in the sky. It is going in the anti-solar direction and the launch is scheduled to avoid getting too close to the Moon. It is very well placed for us and everyone but that is not entirely a coincidence. Please post reports and images on your members’ page. It stays in Orion until Jan 4 when it moves into Monoceros. The first night after launch it has a very high apparent motion in Orion but should be an easy visual target. Attached is the ephemeris for my observatory (it is a text file, just change the ending to txt to view it). Just search for JWST and make sure to configure your observatory location since there will be considerable parallax early on. ![]() You can get an ephemeris from JPL Horizons. It will be interesting to see how bright (or not) it is. JWST is much bigger than these so should be brighter but this will depend on the exact solar aspect angle and properties of the sunshield. Gaia was particularly faint, WMAP and Planck were both between 18-19 at L2. The magnitude is a bit uncertain but Gaia was 10th magnitude on the first night after launch, fading to 18th mag 3 nights later and around 20-21 at L2. The James Webb Space Telescope is now scheduled for launch on Ariane 5 flight VA256 on Christmas eve at at 12:20 UTC.įollowing launch it should be a relatively easy object for us to follow as it transfers to L2. ![]()
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