From Pale Blue Dot to Bright Red Stars
On a lovely February day in 1990, Voyager 1, which would later become the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere, took a picture of the Earth from a staggering distance of 6 billion kilometers.
Carl Sagan called the Earth a pale blue dot, and he left a message to commemorate this spectacular feat. 32 years later, The James Webb Telescope was launched into an orbit 1.5 million kilometers away from the earth and recently released the first pictures taken with its ultra-powerful infrared cameras that are capable of capturing the heat signature of a bumblebee on the moon from Earth. One of the pictures, a deep-field image, is of a patch of sky that is equivalent to the area covered by the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. The result was astonishing and unexpected even to scientists working directly with the James Webb Telescope.
Marcia Rieke, the chief scientist for one of the telescope’s main instruments, said
“No matter where we’ve pointed J.W.S.T., even in the images taken during commissioning that would last a few tens of seconds, we kept getting these galaxies that we weren’t even looking for in the background.”
