Outreach

Spotting JWST

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is one of the most advanced instruments ever built. It orbits at a distance of 15,00,000 km from Earth. From the ground, it appears as a point streaking across background stars. We used to GROWTH-India telescope (GIT) to image the James Webb in space.

We teamed up with the Lulin One-Meter Telescope (LOT) for another perspective. LOT is located at a distance of about 4200 km from GIT which causes a parallax - JWST appears shifted against the background stars. Such a shift was used to measure the distance to objects.

The data used for parallax measurements are publicly available here. This work has been published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society (RNAAS), and can be accessed here.

A 100-second explainer video about the observations of the James Webb Space Telescope using two telescopes, with all animations included.

Scroll down if you are looking for the individual animated GIFs.

JWST in GIT image

JWST Coordinated observations with GIT and LOT.