A Beginner’s Guide to Looking at the Universe

"... Nearly a million miles away, the James Webb Space Telescope just took a picture. Since transmitting its first data in late 2021, Webb has made stunning discoveries, including a plume of water spanning 6,000 miles in our solar system and a galaxy that formed only 390 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago. The telescope is an engineering marvel: Its massive mirror makes it possible to collect light from the faintest objects. It has multiple ways of blocking and dissecting that light, giving us detailed portraits of distant galaxies and close neighbors alike. And its position, orbiting the sun and using Earth as its shield, allows it to take pictures around the clock, sending us up to 57.2 gigabytes of data — the equivalent of tens of thousands of standard iPhone photos — every day. What’s it telling us about our past — and the future of cosmology? ..." 

NY Times