Webb telescope’s first test images include an unexpected ‘selfie’

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. NASA Capturing starlight Webb’s latest challenge was a trial run of the Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, identifying dots of starlight from the same star in each of the 18 hexagonal segments of its massive mirror. Webb created a mosaic of 18 points of starlight when mirror segments reflected this light back at the telescope’s small secondary mirrors and into NIRCam’s detectors. NASA “This initial search covered an area about the size of the full Moon because the segment dots could potentially have been that spread out on the sky,” said Marshall Perrin, deputy telescope scientist for Webb and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in a statement. The lens mainly exists for engineering and alignment, so it was a bonus image that made the Webb team say “holy cow,” said Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.