Daily Telescope: James Webb zooms in on Uranus
Enlarge / James Webb Space Telescope captures a wide view of Uranus. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)
Good morning. It's December 19, and as we get closer to the year-end holidays your humble space correspondent is starting to get a little stir-crazy. Hence the reason for today's abdominal, I mean abominable, headline.
This amazingly cool image of Uranus comes from the Near-Infrared Camera on the James Webb Space Telescope. This wide-field image shows Uranus with an assortment of background galaxies and 14 of its 27 moons, including Oberon and Titania. We can also see the north polar cap gleaming a bright white, as well as the planet's rather faint (in visible light) inner and outer rings.
I've also included the close-up image of Uranus, which is really quite stunning with all of its various rings.