James Webb telescope takes selfie, moves closer to first "real" image

PanARMENIAN.Net - An apparatus as complex as the James Webb Space Telescope takes a little while to get running, so while it entered its orbit late last month, it's still working through its startup process. The latest milestone is a big one, with Webb spotting its first star, 18 times over. And it took a selfie to celebrate, TechCrunch reports.

The Webb is basically a honeycomb-shaped collection of 18 mirrors, which help it capture large amounts of infrared light from its chosen target. But each of these mirrors (plus the secondary mirror out front and many other components) needs to be precisely tuned in order for the image reflected in it to match and overlap that of the others.

"We know that the primary mirror segments aren't aligned, so they actually act like 18 separate telescopes, and we expect to see 18 separate images, one for each mirror, that are a little bit blurry at this point because we haven't aligned or focused anything," said Lee Feinberg, manager of the optical elements on the Webb, in a NASA video that explains all this better than I ever could.

Think of it like the cartoons where a character wakes up after being knocked unconscious and sees the world in double or quadruple, then gradually lines those images up. In this case, of course, the telescope is out in the middle of space, so the best (and pretty much only) thing to safely look at is stars.