JWST Marks 4 years of stunning images and tantalizing discoveries

Time flies fast when you're observing the Universe! 

Hard to believe that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been observing the Universe for four years. To mark the occasion, NASA has released new images of the galaxy, Centaurus A (NGC 5128). This is a spectacular galaxy that is a favorite of astronomers of all levels, and its dark dust lane can easily be seen even in small telescopes.  This is the result of two (or possibly more) galaxies colliding about 2 billion years ago.

Centaurus A was first observed from Parramatta in Sydney's western suburbs a smidge over 200 years ago. (We celebrated this anniversary in a blog article in March.)

This is how astronomers usually see Centaurus A from Earth:

Image by Lefty Wright taken with a Celestron EdgeHD 8" and posted to the BINTEL Society Facebook Group here.

You can see the stars in the centre of the galaxy is heavily obscured by the vast dust clouds. 

In contrast, this is how Webb now allows individual stars to be resolved. 

Webb’s infrared instruments can see through much of the obscuring material to reveal individual stars, nebulae and other structures towards the centre of the galaxy.  This is because the dust clouds that block large amounts of the visual light but is far more transparent to the infrared wavelengths picked up by Webb's instruments. 

It's well worth exploring the full suite of images at the NASA site here. 

NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft wakes up after a long snooze

It's been in the news. It's a pretty routine procedure.

The famous spacecraft that gave us close up views of Pluto is starting the next phase of its mission.

You probably remember the amazing images of Pluto that the New Horizons probe sent back to us in 2015. Following its close encounter with Pluto and its moon, Charon and the extended period it took to transmit that data back to Earth, the mission was granted an extension.

Where has New Horizons been?

The first objective was a flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, which hadn't been discovered when New Horizons was launched in 2006. The close approach was in January 2019 and brought the spacecraft even closer than it had been to Pluto.  

Arrokoth as seen from New Horizons in 2018

If you're asked what's the most distant object visited by a spacecraft from Earth, it's not Pluto nor did either of the Voyager probes encounter any outer Solar System bodies. It's in fact Arrokoth! 

Following this flyby,  New Horizons carried out some observations of Proxima Centauri and other stars. In between these sorts of tasks New Horizons basically powers down into a hibernation mode to silently collect data while conserving power and resources. 

On June the 23rd, flight controllers successfully "woke up" New Horizons following a 321 day deeps space snooze. It began transmitting data it had collected during this time. The spacecraft is 9.5 billion km from Earth and even at the speed of light, this data took nearly 9 hours to arrive back to its home planet. 

New Horizons received a full health check and some software upgrades

What's New Horizons going to do now?

There's hopes for another encounter with a Kuiper belt object even further away from Arrokoth. The problem is that involves flying towards something that hasn't been discovered yet. 

I had a chat with Dr. Alan Stern who is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto.  Essentially New Horizons is observing the outer edges of the Solar System while scanning the sky for possible to destinations.

"We are currently doing outer heliosphere observations and awaiting a crossing of the heliosphere’s termination shock sometime in the next 5 or so years. We are also searching for a new flyby target using data from the Vera Rubin Observatory and preparing to make new KBO (Kuiper Belt Object) observations next year." he told me. 

While the Voyager probes continue to function somewhat and continue to provide observation of deep space, the 1970s technology onboard doesn't have the capabilities of the more advanced New Horizons.  

Major update now out for ZWO Seestar S30 Pro owners

These tiny little telescopes keep getting more impressive

ZWO released a major app and firmware update for their Seestar Smart Telescopes. Many of the new features are available for the Seestar S50 and S30 models, however the additional hardware in the Seestar S30 Pro telescope can take best advantage of this update. 

Some of the additions that caught our eye include:

Star trails

Creates stills and videos to highlight the visual images of the star fields above your head. 

Image via @astroman.au

"One tap" Milky Way shooting

This lets you easily plan and compose 180-degree Milky Way panoramas.

"One tap" all-night planning

Make plans to start and plan an all-night imaging session, even across multiple objects. 

There's also been major feature updates to the Seestar image enhancement abilities and we're looking forward to the extended network control system. This will allow you to connect to and control multiple Seestar telescopes over a LAN. 

These new features will be automatically available when you update your ZWO Seestar Apple iOS or Android app. 

Saturn is in the morning sky for early risers

The rings are slowly opening up as well

Where Saturn will be in the sky around 5.00am on Sunday the 12th of July 2026 as seen from Sydney. Image via Stellarium

Saturn has been climbing across the early morning sky, getting higher before dawn as it heads to visibility through the night from late September and October. The rings can now be more easily seen in even small telescopes.  There's also a nice gathering of Mars, Uranus and the Moon near the horizon. If you have a clear view to the north, it might even be worth having a crack at spotting the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) which will be very low.  This covers more sky than several full Moons, so you'll probably need binoculars to take in the entire galaxy. 

Next SpaceX Starship flight this week. Lucky 13?

The 13th test flight of SpaceX's massive Starship rocket is due to take place in the coming week. This is the another launch of the "V3" version and with each flight, it continues be closer to being major launch platform.  We'll likely have news of how the flight week went in next week's blog.  Keep an eye updates on the launch here. 

Cheers,

Earl White

BINTEL

11th July 2026