US President Joe Biden will release the first color image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope at the White House today, July 11, a NASA press release reveals.
It marks the beginning of the science operation of the most powerful space observatory launched-to-date. The unveiling will also be the culmination of years of preparation for a $10 billion project, which launched on December 25, 2021 after years of preparation.
“We’re going to give humanity a new view of the cosmos, and it’s a view we’ve never seen before,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who will-be at White House presentation later today, told reporters at a news conference via CBS News.
“One of these images … is the deepest image of our universe ever taken,” he said. “And we’re just beginning to understand what Webb can and will do.”
In a new educational video, amateur astrophysicist Ethan Gone highlights the immense power of James Webb’s instruments by comparing recent NASA teaser images with observations made from Earth.
It is official ! NASA’s first color image to be released today
President Biden will release the first color photo taken by James Webb today. Meanwhile, the full release of the first full science images of NASA’s James Webb will take place tomorrow, July 12, revealing a wealth of scientific data to the world. NASA has listed the main cosmic targets and the images that NASA will publish tomorrow on its website.
These include a massive exoplanet, known as WASP-96 b, located outside our galaxy, and the Carina Nebula, which is one of the largest & brightest nebula visible in the sky. . The US space agency did not specify the content of the image that will be revealed today.
Nelson’s comments high-light the fact that we’re only just beginning James Webb’s journey, meaning that the first color images will only scratch the surface of what we’ll see in the coming years.
An impressive video hints at the great power of James Webb
Before the release of the first color images of James Webb, an amateur astro photographer, Ethan Gone, posted a video showing a good indication of James Webb’s strength. By comparing their own observations with a recent teaser image by James Webb, they gave a clue to the full range of capabilities of the space observatory.
Last week, NASA revealed a teaser image captured by James Webb’s Guidance Sensor. Gone trained his own ground-based telescope on the same part of the sky and took 6 hours of exposure. These 6 hours of exposure resulted in a dramatic image showing a array-of-stars from our galaxy and a distant galaxy called 2MASS 16235798 + 2826079.
Zooming in even further into the dark region of their observation, Gone showed it to reveal a few faint stars. Then, thanks to impressive editing, Gone’s video perfectly overlays a NASA teaser image taken by James Webb in front of an amateur astro photographer observation.
In contrast to Gone image, NASA’s teaser image shows thousands of galaxies in parts of the sky that were black just seconds before. Be sure to check out the video (embedded above).
Source: NASA, CSA, and FGS team
Amazingly, the teaser image of James Webb wasn’t even captured by one of the space observatory’s main imaging cameras.
Images captured by the Fine Guidance Sensor, which captures images of distant spatial objects in search of points of interest. Then, James Webb’s team trained the most powerful image capture instruments in the same region of the sky.
How to watch NASA’s James Webb image reveal events
Earlier this year, NASA released the first calibration image taken by James Webb – an image of a star 2,000 light-years away. But today & tomorrow are certainly the major events, and they will usher in a bold new era for astronomy.
The photo of President Biden’s White House revealed later today and the full reveal tomorrow can be viewed on NASA TV via their YouTube channel (embedded above). The White House event begins at 5:00 p.m. ET today, and tomorrow’s premiere event begins at 10:30 a.m. ET, with pre-shows starting a little earlier at 9:45 a.m. ET.
