Summary draft 1 (Space Telescope)

From the webpage “Why stars look spiky in images from the James Webb Space Telescope” from The Verge (2022) tells us the reason why the stars look spiky. Two functions from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) contribute to why the star looks spiky in images from JWST. They are primary and secondary mirrors and the distance between the two mirrors. The JWST is a reflecting telescope, what it means is that large primary mirror gathers the light and reflects it back to a smaller mirror. The shape of the primary will affect how the light is being reflected onto the secondary mirror. Hence, a hexagonal mirror results in an image with six diffraction spikes. The near-infrared cameras (NIRCam), near-infrared spectrographs (NIRSpec) from James Webb Space Telescope (n.d). The near-infrared camera (NIRCam) is JWST’s primary imager capable of covering ‘wavelength range 0.6 to 5 microns’ from NASA (n.d). NIRCam can detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies in the process of formation. The near-infrared spectrographs (NIRSpec) is an instrument that analysis the wavelength that is captured by the NIRCam from NASA (n.d).

Reference

NASA. (n.d.). Observatory - webb/NASA. NASA. Retrieved September 18, 2022, from https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/index.html