The forthcoming launch of theJames Webb Space Telescopeoffers unprecedented new opportunities for astronomers.
Its also a timely opportunity to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes have shown us.
Astronomers rarely use their telescopes to simply take pictures.
Choosing just a handful of images was not easy.
I limited my selection to images produced by publicly-funded telescopes and which reveal some interesting science.
I tried to avoid very popular images which have already been viewed widely.
The image was takenin October 2017when the spacecraft was 18,906 kilometers away from the tops of Jupiters clouds.
By looking down on the poles of Jupiter, Juno showed us a different view of a familiar planet.
The familiar rainbow of colors is only a tiny fraction of what physicists call the electromagnetic spectrum.
Beyond red is the infrared, which carries less energy than optical light.
An infrared camera can see objects too cool to be detectable by the human eye.
In space, it can also see through dust, which otherwise completely obscures our view.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be the largest infrared observatory ever launched.
Until now, the European Space AgencysHerschel Space Observatoryhas been the largest.
A nebula is a cloud of gas in space.
The Eagle Nebula is 6,500 light-years away from Earth, which is quite close by astronomical standards.
This nebula is a site of vigorous star formation.
A close-up view of a feature near the center of this image has been called the Pillars of Creation.
The Galactic Center
Can you spot the Quintuplet cluster and the Arches?
Hubble: NASA, ESA, and Q.D.
It also uses infrared light, this time combining data from two Nasa telescopes,HubbleandSpitzer.
The bright white region in the lower right of the image is the very center of our Galaxy.
Otherstar clustersare visible too.
These two clusters include some of the most massive stars known.
Abell 370
Abell 370 is a cluster of hundreds of galaxies about five billion light years away from Earth.
Some of the most dramatic visible objects are clusters of galaxies that form at the intersection of filaments.
Abell 370 is a cluster of hundreds of galaxies about five billion light-years away from us.
In the picture, you might see elongated arcs of light.
These are the magnified and distorted images of far more distant galaxies.
This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing because the warped spacetime acts like an optical lens.
Overlapping images of several other distant galaxies comprise the arc of the dragons body.
In this case, the lensed galaxys population of stars can be examined in detail.
TheHubble Ultra Deep Fieldcontains nearly 10,000 objects, almost all of which are very distant galaxies.
Some of these objects are among the oldest and most distant known.
Here were seeing light from ancient stars whose local contemporaries have long since been extinguished.
This was the last major change in the properties of the universe as a whole.
