A Year of Discoveries

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of the first images produced by NASA's groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope, an observatory that has drastically expanded humanity's knowledge of the early universe while inspiring the world with a continual stream of stunning deep-space images (see full gallery).

Launched in December 2021 in collaboration with the European and Canadian space agencies, the Webb orbits the sun at a point roughly 1 million miles beyond Earth (see visual), unlike its Earth-orbiting predecessor, Hubble. Its infrared cameras capture deep-space starlight invisible to the human eye or obscured by dust clouds, enabling it to effectively look backward in time into the early stages of the universe.

To honor the anniversary, NASA released new images of 50 young sun-sized stars within the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth—roughly 390 light-years away. Learn about the aesthetic choices behind the production of the Webb images here.