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James Webb telescope...

She does a once a month thing which is a round up of space science news and a 'what you can see in the night sky right now' thing which is well worth catching if you have any interest in looking up.

Although since I have moved back to the Lancashire coast it seems I am basically living in a permanent low lying rain cloud and have given up ever seeing the stars again :)

The cloud cover's low on the Clwydian Hills, too.
 
Two weeks to go before it goes into its orbit.
Then 5 months of checking and calibrations & getting cold enough to operate.
Now that is cold.
The science it has to keep the thing cold by pressurising helium vithout vibration is simply astonishing.
 
You have to love a good commissioning process. Especially when the target system is further away than the lab across the car park!
 
Best nerd joke evah. The @NASAWebb twitter account blocked the @NASASun, @NASAMoon and @NASAEarth accounts.

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Joe
 
Then comes the mirror alignment.


Utterly fascinating engineering to uncover whatever lurks out there. Interestingly, even though the James Webb telescope sees in the infrared band, its mirror is large enough collectively that the resolution is equivalent to that of the Hubble telescope in the visible band.

Joe
 
Webb's mirrors are covered in a microscopically thin layer of gold to reflect infrared light, and the gold came into being courtesy of nucleosynthesis via supernovae and from neutron stars bumping together. It's kinda weird how these things came to be.

Joe
 
Just as the first images come through and as we become all excited nuclear war will probably break out, what a shame
I was thinking along the same lines - we are about to discover so much about the past, yet as usual, learn nothing from it.
 


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