This is the James Webb Space Telescope with its sun shield fully deployed:

The animation is made up of five observations taken using the Canary Three telescope on January 6, 2022, between 02:00 and 3:15 UT.

The JWST was about 68% of the way to the Sun-Earth Lagrange 2 point when this was taken. At the time, the JWST deployed and tensioned the sun shield and deployed the secondary mirror as well.

Of course, xkcd.com has a comic about the sun shield deployment – here it is:

The comic makes perfect sense 🙂

Congratulations to the JWST team on getting this far and astronomers around the world are looking forward to years of new discoveries with this amazing instrument.

Process Images from the JWST

If you’re a PixInsight user, or maybe considering using PixInsight, this tutorial teaches everything you need to know on how to download and process JWST images – the ultimate in remote astrophotography!