Webb Telescope: Researchers Unveil Spectacularly Large Image of Space

By Adam Barnhardt

In the month the Webb Space Telescope has been up and running, one stellar image after the next has been released to the public, showing the furthest reaches of space to anyone curious. Just this week, a dynamite snapshot of Jupiter plus its rings and moons went viral. Now, a group of researchers has captured the largest image the telescope has taken. Using 690 frames taken from the observatory's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), a behemoth of an image has been created and released to the public.

Called Epoch 1 by the team at CEERS, the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, the image shows what seems to be infinite galaxies across the night sky. Per a press release shared by the group, the images show just a fraction of the sky near the handle of the Big Dipper.

"Epoch 1 covers less than half of our total survey area on the sky and already the images have led to new discoveries and an unexpected, but not unwelcome, abundance of never-before-seen galaxies," the press release reads. "We hope you enjoy exploring these images as much as we have enjoyed studying them, and be sure to open the high-resolution ones to zoom in – the sheer number of galaxies we have captured so far is awe-inspiring!"

CEERS team member Rebecca Larson teased more upcoming results in a thread on Twitter, saying the images released by the group already are just a sample of what's to come. "P.S. This is JUST Epoch 1 of our [CEERS] observations (our mosaic = purple squares on the right)," she tweeted. "We are less than halfway through our full survey, and already our data have led to new discoveries and an unexpected, but not unwelcome, abundance of never-before-seen galaxies."

You can see and download the high-resolution images released by CESS here.

For more photos from the Webb Space Telescope and other cosmic stories, check out our ComicBook Invasion hub here.

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