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James Webb Space Telescope Poster

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is a true technological marvel. The largest and most complex space telescope ever built, Webb will be able to gather light that has been traveling for 13.5 billion years, almost since the beginning of the universe. In effect, Webb is a time machine, allowing us to peer at the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. Because it gathers infrared light, it will see right through the giant clouds of dust that block the view of most other telescopes. Webb will be 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. Most notably, once it unfolds its 21-foot-wide (6.5-meter-wide) set of segmented mirrors, Webb will be powerful enough to search for water vapor in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. It will open a new window on these exoplanets, observing them in wavelengths of light at which they have never been seen before and helping us gain new insights about their nature. Webb will help us understand how galaxies evolve over billions of years into grand spirals, like our own Milky Way, search for signs of habitability on distant planets, and penetrate into the hearts of dust-shrouded stellar nurseries. The observatory is expected to launch in 2021.

Credit
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Today is the day that the James Webb Space Telescope has been launched and started its journey of discovery to look butter and further than we have ever done before.

It is a in a sense a true time machine as with its incredibly sensitive telescope it can see light from 13.6 billion light years away which also means that it sees light that has been traveling for 13.6 billion light years originating from the early days of the universe.

Some of the great points of this poster are:
• The golden lines are a diagram showing the earth-sun system with the lagrange points and the orbits of the earth and the moon.
• The repeating theme of hexagons is really cool, beginning with the mirrors of the telescope itself and then going upward.
• The theme of looking back into time starting from the first hexagons with the forming of planets, to the forming of galaxies, to the creation of the first stars to finally in the final hexagon the era before star formation so long long ago.

Anyway while it might not be an image that falls a bit outside of the usual images hosted on this website I do think that this is important enough occasion to go outside of the usual curve of this website for such a great poster.

Merry Christmas everyone.

P.S. I also uploaded the very nice poster of Hubble (post #5004006)
P.P.S The credit listed for this poster is “NASA / JPL-Caltech” but no individual artist, should I list “NASA” & “JPL-Caltech” as the artist?