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Photons Received: Webb Sees Its First Star – 18 Times

Monday, February 14th 2022 09:16 AM

  The James Webb Space Telescope is nearing completion of the first phase of the months-long process of aligning the observatory’s primary mirror using the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. The team’s challenge was twofold: confirm that NIRCam was ready to collect light from celestial objects, and then identify starlight from the same star in each of the 18 primary mirro...

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Photons Incoming: Webb Team Begins Aligning the Telescope

Monday, February 7th 2022 10:18 AM

  This week, the three-month process of aligning the telescope began – and over the last day, Webb team members saw the first photons of starlight that traveled through the entire telescope and were detected by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. This milestone marks the first of many steps to capture images that are at first unfocused and use them to slowly fine-tune the tel...

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Orbital Insertion Burn a Success, Webb Arrives at L2

Tuesday, January 25th 2022 09:18 AM

  Today, at 2 p.m. EST, Webb fired its onboard thrusters for nearly five minutes (297 seconds) to complete the final postlaunch course correction to Webb’s trajectory. This mid-course correction burn inserted Webb toward its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, nearly 1 million miles away from the Earth. The final mid-course burn added only about 3.6 miles pe...

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Sky This Month March 2022

Tuesday, March 1st 2022 09:18 AM

Venus continues to dominate in the morning, along with a retinue of fellow planets gracing the predawn sky. Mars, Saturn, and elusive Mercury provide lots to observe. Jupiter largely is hidden from view after its conjunction with the Sun. Meanwhile, the evening sky carries William Herschel’s great discovery of 1781, the planet Uranus, easily visible in binoculars. Let’s start with a c...

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Snapshot: A study in stellar objects

Wednesday, February 16th 2022 09:23 AM

  Visible light — the rainbow of colors that human eyes can detect — is only one kind of light. The electromagnetic spectrum ranges from short, highly energetic gamma rays to long, low-energy radio waves. In order to get a full picture of a cosmic object, researchers need telescopes that can investigate it across this spectrum. R Quarii   In this system, a stellar remnant...

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Meet 20 great astronomers who made the history books

Tuesday, February 15th 2022 09:45 AM

  I love lists. I’ve created them for the 25 greatest astrophotos, 25 essential telescope accessories, 12 great lunar targets, 10 things to do on a cloudy night, and lots more. For our 500th issue, I even wrote “The 500 Coolest Things About Space,” which took up the whole issue. Most were just lists, but for this one, I’m doing something different. I’m ranking m...

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