In mid-August, a team of astronomers released 690 images each corresponding to a different portion of the sky, all representing the equivalent of a tenth of a full moon — or the equivalent of the portion of the sky that you can see through a straw.
But a straw through which one could dive to see up to 13 billion light-years. Each “straw” therefore shows thousands, if not tens of thousands, of galaxies through different stages of their existence.
The team is called Cosmic Evolution Early Realease Science Survey (CEERS), and is just one of many teams around the world that have booked observing time on the James-Webb (JWST). Another such team published on August 22 an image of Jupiter containing, in the infrared, a wealth of detail on its clouds never seen so far – recalling in passing that the new telescope also has the capacity to observe objects which, astronomically, are very close to us.
As for CEERS, it is an international collaboration whose first objective is to test and validate galaxy surveys carried out before the JWST. Its mosaic of 690 images totaling a rectangle of 31,000 by 10,000 pixels, makes it the largest survey of galaxies — yet. The image below highlights six of the observable objects across the entire mosaic, such as a spiral galaxy (1), and groups of interacting galaxies (3 and 4).
