Disco was right! Nasa’s glitterball images were predicted by pop music

What did you see when the first images were released by NASA? Your answer may depend on your experience with astrophysics.

Bill Nelson, a former senator and ex-astronaut, is the administrator of NASA.

Music fans were more interested in comparing the images to dream pop, funk and disco album covers from the Cocteau Twins, Parliament and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in an aesthetically apt way.

The Los Angeles Times reporters described the telescope's initial image as "galaxies swirling around a central point like the light thrown off from a disco ball"

Is the universe just a re-enactment of 1970s disco?

While the scientifically inclined might view these images as startlingly new depictions of light from aeons ago, those with a closer eye on the clubs and record rack can see that we have been here before.

The visual link between the outer limits of the disco and the inner space of the disco can be seen in vintage disco videos and archival Italian DJ mixes.

Music has a long history of obsession with the extraterrestrial, from The Planets to Ziggy Stardust and the Dark Side of the moon.

The disco pioneers of the 70s added more sparkle to the stars and a brighter spectrum of color to the universe. The funkadelic images from James Webb suggest they were right to do so. Sun Ra proclaimed that space is the place.

Disco and space run deeper than sleeve art. The DJ widely credited with laying the foundations of disco is David Mancuso. Spacey records such as Life On Mars and Space Princess were favored by his sets.

Larry Levan, resident DJ at the Paradise Garage, who kept disco alive in the 1980s, chose an equally extraterrestrial playlist with tunes likeGalaxy by War and Serious, Satellite Party.

The person who launched disco into deep space is the Italian DJ Daniele Baldelli, who in 1979 was hired by a club called Cosmic. Baldelli combined soul and funk records with British and European technopop, imported African and Brazilian sounds, as well as snatches of German "kosmische Musik" (known in English as "Krautrock"), by bands such as Tangerine Dream.

The Baia degli Angeli beach club on the Adriatic Coast was a huge hit with Baldelli and other Cosmic DJs. Music producers were able to get their records played by the DJs by reversing-engineering the sound. It led to spacey, hi-tech records such as Feel the Drive by Doctor's Cat finding favour in the Italian peninsula, in neighboring Germany, and in the distant clubs of Chicago and Detroit. These singles, prized by collectors, reached a new audience in the late 1990s and early 2000s thanks to reissue labels.

The Cosmic Cliffs, a shimmering wall of space gas and stars, is referred to as by the media team as the place of candy-coloured space gas and budding stars.

40 years after the Disco Demolition Night tried to bring an end to disco, it seems like it is still going strong. Maybe NASA should show some love.

The deep space probes were launched in 1977. Each was fitted with a gold- plated copper 12-inch record, etched with recordings from Earth, as well as universally comprehensible instructions for whichever alien crate-digger first chanced upon the probe. Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, was unmasked as a former Nazi party member after the launch of the Voyager. That is not very modern. Maybe you should pick something a bit more disco when you approach the record lathe with a view to wang the finished disc deep into the universe.