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+--- Thread: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations (/showthread.php?tid=265208)
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James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - DP - 03-17-2022
The American space agency has achieved a major milestone in its preparation of the new James Webb Space Telescope.
Engineers say they have now managed to fully focus the $10bn observatory on a test star. The pin-sharp performance is even better than hoped, they add.
To get to this stage, all of Webb's mirrors had to be aligned to tiny fractions of the width of a human hair.
But the agency cautions that a lot of work still lies ahead before the telescope can be declared operational.
Lee Feinberg, the Nasa engineer who has led the development of Webb's optical elements, described the release of the first properly focused image as phenomenal.
"You not only see the star and the spikes from the diffraction of the star, but you see other stars in the field that are tightly focused, just like we expect, and all sorts of other interesting structure in the background," he told reporters.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60771210
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - gadje - 03-17-2022
if you focused a little better you could see a thread about half dozen lines below.
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - DP - 03-17-2022
Damn! How did I not see it... More coffee-
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - Lux Interior - 03-17-2022
Did
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - cbelt3 - 03-17-2022
Now see the power of this fully operational battle Telescope !!!!
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - Speedy - 03-17-2022
It would be nice to know how far away that star is.
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - NewtonMP2100 - 03-17-2022
....in a galaxy....far....far.....away.....
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - Lux Interior - 03-17-2022
Speedy wrote:
It would be nice to know how far away that star is.
At least a thousand miles!
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - Lew Zealand - 03-17-2022
Speedy wrote:
It would be nice to know how far away that star is.
The star irrelevant as the Hubble can image it easily. This is more about if the Webb Telescope can focus a relatively bright star and not have it cause distracting image quality problems that cloud over the faint things in the background, thus reducing it's sensitivity.
The 6-pointed star artifact is a necessary evil when you have a segmented mirror (or a regular obstructed telescope like the Hubble) but as seeing as there's nothing major affecting the image on top of that (looks superficially good here), then it should have good sensitivity when everything in the FOV are faint objects, which is this 'scope's forté.
Re: James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations - Lew Zealand - 03-17-2022
Speedy wrote:
It would be nice to know how far away that star is.
OK and to directly answer your question, it's about 610 parsecs away (Han will be there in less than 51 undefined units of time), or about 2,000 light years.
For reference:
The closest star is about 4.3 light years away
The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across
Most of the stars you can see in a dark sky are within 4,000 light years (yeah, not that much)
So it's not so close and not so far as things go...