James Webb Space Telescope Takes Its First Images of Saturn

NASA's latest space telescope has finally gazed at the Father of the Gods for the first time.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) recently took aim at Saturn for the first time and took pictures of it using its many instruments, resulting in some rather notable shots.

Unfortunately, the pictures are not yet ready to be released to the public as of press time - they still need processing.

Webb Saturn Pictures Details

Pictures from Webb showcase the space telescope's capabilities in a quality better than what experts expect from it. You may recall that astronomers praised the space telescope's output during the time it was being tested before it received its commission.

However, the photos it brings have to start from somewhere, which is the case for the ones it captured of Saturn. According to Space.com, the images of the Father of the Gods Webb took between June 24 and 25 exist as raw unprocessed black-and-white data - they are still unfit for public release.

The pictures, however, are published and viewable on the unofficial website JWST feed, which contains every data Webb collected since it began operations.

There is an explanation why Webb's photos are in black-and-white, which is different from the cameras used here on Earth. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), which operates the telescope with NASA, Webb doesn't take color images as a film camera would.

Instead, they beam back black-and-white images back to Earth like any modern telescope due to them being exposures, or "frames," which reflect the number of particles of light or photons that Webb's instruments detected, such as the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

As a result, a pixel collecting more light during a photo's processing shows how much light was responsible for it with high accuracy, which is critical for deriving scientific results from Webb's data. Thanks to this, Saturn appears as a bright indistinct shape, with its ring system appearing as a glowing band.

Despite the state of Webb's Saturn pictures, they still feature quite the view of the planet and its famous ring system - they act as a teaser of what would be an incredible photo from Webb after processing.

James Webb Space Telescope Details

Webb is the largest and most powerful space telescope built; its instruments and capabilities allow scientists to look at what the universe was like about 200 million years after the Big Bang, per NASA. It is designed to replace the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA's go-to space observatory, though the aging space telescope still has a role to play in NASA's studies of the universe.

Aside from looking at what the universe was like about 200 million years after the Big Bang, scientists also want to use Webb to study exoplanets, or planets not within our Solar System, in the hunt for those with the building blocks of life.