NASA shows first star image taken by James Webb telescope after focusing

NASA has released a new photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The US space agency says the telescope’s mirror is so well adjusted that the images are likely to be better than expected.

NASA has released an image of the star 2MASS J17554042+6551277 taken with the Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera. The image is the first result of an important milestone that the telescope completed on March 11: that of fine phasing. That is focusing the telescope using data from the NIRCam, which records infrared images. During that process it was found that ‘every optical parameter that has been checked and tested performs satisfactorily or above expectations’, writes NASA. The image of the star that has now been taken was created from images taken using all 18 individual mirrors of the telescope.

According to NASA, the NIRCam is now fully set up to work properly with the JWST’s primary mirror. The NIRCam is the primary camera on the telescope, but there are some other important scientific instruments, such as two spectrographs: the Near-Infrared Spectograph and the Mid-Infrared Instrument. They will be further aligned and focused in the next month and a half. This is followed by another process of final focusing of all instruments together.

NASA says the images are better than expected. “Performance exceeds our expectations,” says optics manager Ritva Keski-Kuha. No idiosyncrasies were detected while focusing. “The team found no critical issues and no measurable contamination or blockages in the telescope’s optics,” the space agency wrote.

In addition to the star 2MASS, dozens of galaxies can also be seen. Those objects are just bycatch for the process of focusing the telescope, but these kinds of deep-field photos with multiple galaxies that are very far away will come along more often. While the Hubble telescope sometimes had to be pointed for weeks at a certain point for such deep-field photos, James Webb takes much less time.