A Vista of 100 Billion Flares: Photos From the James Webb Telescope

If there's one reason to smile It's when you look up out at night You're fortunate enough To drink in a vista 100 billion flares Display a glowing history Splayed out across a canvas, the night sky But, for a moment just contemplate When looking up, you only saw a blank slate And, for a moment just contemplate It appears that heaven's been abandoned -Rou Reynolds

-  Aron Vaughan

On those cloudy summer nights when light can't penetrate the mass of liquid droplets, frozen crystals and other particles suspended in the atmosphere, consider taking a look at the latest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images. They give us an unprecedented view into the ethereal realm of the cosmos beyond our Pale Blue Dot- and they're being beamed back to Earth at an impressive rate.

NASA revealed the first five images taken by the new observatory July 12. Streaming live from the Goddard Flight Center in Maryland, scientists presented the photos one by one accompanied by detailed explanations.

A team of over 20,000 engineers and scientists worked over the course of more than 20 years leading up to JWST's launch on Christmas Day, 2021.

Here are the first official images from NASA's newest deep field observatory.

Image 1: Deep Field Photo of a Cluster of Galaxies

We're seeing these galaxies as they looked over 13 billion years ago, around the same time our Sun was born. You can see individual clusters of stars forming and faint red galaxies in the background. These detailed deep-field images are exactly what JWST was designed to capture.

In comparison, the Hubble extreme deep field took two weeks of continuous work to produce a photo with less than half the clarity of this one.

"With Webb, we took that image before breakfast," said operations project scientist Jane Rigby.

Image 2: Exoplanet 

WASP 96-b is an exoplanet 1000 light years away-which is relatively close on a universal scale. It is a hot, gaseous, giant planet similar to Jupiter. The biggest breakthrough JWST provided about the planet, however, is that Wasp 96b shows evidence of having atmospheric water, which is essential to sustaining life. Exoplanet scientists at NASA will continue to investigate WASP 96-b, other exoplanets, Mars, and asteroids using the JWST.