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Stephen’s Quintet:

300 million light years away, four galaxies in a
very tight local group and one galaxy (composite)
is actually in the foreground only 40 million light
years away from earth. The four galaxies are the
tightest galaxy grouping that has been discovered.
The two galaxy near to each other are in the
process of merging and all four of them will merge
eventually. This image is largest of JWST's first
images, a composite of over 1000 images. When
all added up, it's 150 million pixels.

Transitioning to the MIRI (mid-infrared) image we can see something immediately pop out at us. There is something
very bright in the uppermost galaxy. That is a supermassive black hole, 24 million times the mass of the sun and it is
actively adding material to itself, and emitting more energy than 40 billion suns.

Webb’s first deep field

There is a galaxy cluster 4.6 billion light years from
the earth in the center of the image (image 1). It isn't
so much about the galaxy cluster that is the exciting
part. It is what it enables since it's so massive, it
creates a dip in space and as light moves through that
dip, it bends. It bends in such a way that light coming
from much mote distant galaxies gets magnified.
These are galaxies that would be far too small to see
with a telescope even as advanced as the webb. This
is called Gravitational Lensing and in effect, it has
allowed us to make a telescope that is 4.6 billion light
years long.
This is also a deep field image, there isn't much space in this image that doesn't contain a galaxy and some of them
are very distant and in general, because the universe 's expansion stretches out light making it redder. The redder a
galaxy is, the older it is. The tiny red dot (image 2) is 13.1 billion light years away and we are seeing it as it existed
13.1 billion years ago. This image was taken by JWST in just 12.5 hours (it would have taken Hubble telescope
about 10 days).

Legends in the Sky - Constellation Tales

A Constellation is agroup of stars that incorporates a specific
shape in the sky and has been given a name. These stars are far
away from Earth. They are not connected to each other at all.
Some stars in a constellation might be close while others are
very far away. But, if you were to draw lines in the sky between
the stars like a dot-to-dot puzzle - and use lots of imagination -
the picture would look like an object, animal, or person. Over
time, cultures around the world have had different names and
numbers of constellations depending on what people thought
they saw. There are 88 offically recognized constellations.
- Dr.B.Latha (Dept of Physics)

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