Webb spies on Jupiter from a distance
The Webb Space Telescope is currently orbiting the Sun at a gravitational sweet spot known as L2. Webb is hundreds of millions of miles away from Jupiter, yet it still managed to take a series of highly detailed images of the gas giant in late July, using its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam). “We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” said Imke de Pater, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who led the observations, in a statement. “We’ve never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all quite incredible.” As a fun aside, the earliest astronomical image ever taken of Jupiter dates back to 1879.
