Webb's First Deep Field
President Biden unveils Webb's First Deep Field
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The whole field covers a piece of sky about the apparent size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, and it is crowded with thousands of galaxies.
A White House preview on 11 July 2022
At a White House event on 11 July 2022, President Joe Biden publicly unveiled the James Webb Space Telescope's first full-color image: a near-infrared view centered on the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, named Webb's First Deep Field.
Only that one target was shown that evening. NASA, ESA and CSA released four more targets and spectroscopic data the following morning.
Twelve and a half hours of NIRCam
Webb's NIRCam built the composite from exposures at several wavelengths totaling 12.5 hours. It is not a single optical snapshot — near-infrared exposures are mapped into visible colors.
The foreground cluster appears as it looked 4.6 billion years ago. Its mass gravitationally magnified and distorted galaxies lying far behind it, stretching them into the arcs scattered across the field.
First full-color, not first ever
NASA calls this Webb's first full-color image, not its first operational image. It was the first full-color, science-quality public image, part of the Early Release Observations; alignment and commissioning images had already been published.
It came after roughly six months of deployment, cooling, mirror alignment and instrument commissioning for a telescope whose 6.5-metre primary mirror is built from 18 segments. NASA identifies the full release the next morning as the start of Webb's science operations.
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