Webb captures one of first medium-deep wide-field images of the universe

NASA's most powerful space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, has captured one of the first medium-deep wide-field images of the universe, which features a portion of the sky called the North Ecliptic Pole.

The image is from the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) GTO program. It is a composite of separate exposures acquired by Webb using the NIRCam instrument and the Hubble Space Telescope using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments.

The agency defines "medium-deep" as the faintest objects that can be seen in this image, which are about 29th magnitude (1 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye), while "wide-field" refers to the total area that will be covered by the program, about one-twelfth the area of the full moon.

The above image unveils in unprecedented detail and to exquisite depth a universe full of galaxies to the furthest reaches, many of which were previously unseen by Hubble or the largest ground-based telescopes, as well as an assortment of stars within our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Galactic panoramic 📸This shot is just a portion of what will be the complete wide field covered by this Webb program, but it’s already unveiling galaxies in unprecedented detail and depth. The multi-wavelength image combines Webb & @NASAHubble data: https://t.co/Ft8QkhWJPt pic.twitter.com/VHjdUR6ans

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) December 14, 2022

"Webb's images are truly phenomenal, really beyond my wildest dreams. They allow me to measure the number density of galaxies shining to very faint infrared limits and the total amount of light they produce," said Rogier Windhorst, Regents Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and PEARLS principal investigator. 

"The stunning image quality of Webb is truly out of this world. To catch a glimpse of very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over a large area, which this PEARLS field provides," stated Anton Koekemoer, a research astronomer at STScI, who assembled the PEARLS images into very large mosaics.