DARK SKY HAPPENINGS - August 2022

Sunrise-Sunset (The time of sunrise and sunset assumes a flat horizon. Actual time may vary depending upon the landscape.)

This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.

Launched on Christmas Day 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has begun to reveal its capabilities. This mid-infrared telescope will reveal what galaxies looked like in the early stages of the Universe, will see through nebulas to see how new stars form, and will study the chemical makeup of everything, including possible habitable exoplanets. The following images are a few of the first revealed, and the descriptions are from NASA. For all the first images and descriptions visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.