Video by @babaktafreshi | From the roof of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, let’s fly out to almost five billion light-years away, where a galaxy cluster is revealed by @nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope. The image of Webb’s First Deep Field offers the sharpest infrared view of the universe so far.
Striking facts: The video begins with a wide-angle view of the sky that I photographed in southern Kenya and has a similar angle to our own eyes’ field of view. Webb’s First Deep Field is several thousand times smaller, “approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length,” as NASA described it.
In my second image, shot using a telephoto lens, the square marking the deep field area in the southern constellation Volans is still extremely small and shows just a blank background when zoomed in. The objects here are barely perceptible and so distant that the field remains blank to a professional telescope. Thousands of galaxies—including the faintest objects ever observed in infrared—appears in this 12-hour total exposure by Webb. The galaxy cluster is SMACS 0723. Its light belongs to 4.6 billion years ago, when Earth was just about to form. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it and distorting their image to extended arcs.
Webb’s First Deep Field photo by NASA (@nasa), ESA, CSA, and STScI
Music by composer Barbad Bayat. #astronomy#nasawebb#kilimanjaro#twanight