NASA's new space telescope has gazed into the distant universe and shown perfect vision, a spiky image of a distant star photobombed by thousands of ancient galaxies.
The image released Wednesday from the James Webb Space Telescope is a test shot, not an official science observation, to see how its 18 hexagonal mirrors worked together for a single coordinated image taken 1 million miles away from Earth. It worked better than expected, according to officials.
NASA looked at a star with 18 separate images from its mirror segments.
Scientists were excited as they watched the test photos arrive. The test image was aimed at a star 100 times fainter than the human eye can see. A light-year is over 6 trillion miles.
The shape of the mirrors and filters made the star look more red and spiky, but the background stole the show.
"You can't help but see those thousands of galaxies behind it, it's really gorgeous," said Jane Rigby, the operations project scientist.
The galaxies are billions of years old. She said that scientists hope that with the help of a telescope, they will be able to see so far back in time that it will only be a couple hundred million years after the Big bang.
The first science images will be late June or early July.
The $10 billion telescope was launched from South America in December and reached its designated perch in January.
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