Goddard View magazine: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Mirror & John Mather, May 2016

The James Webb Space Telescope (the follow-on to the Hubble Space Telescope, due to be launched in 2018) is currently being assembled in the giant cleanroom at Goddard. The primary mirror (18 hexagonal segments, each more than 5 feet across) was assembled during the winter of 2016, and in late April, the black protective covers were removed, displaying the completed gold-covered mirror for the first time. (See photo at the bottom of this page.)

Then, about a week later, on May 4, 2016, the mirror was pivoted so that it was directly facing the observation window. It remained in this configuration for less than 2 hours, before it was rotated 90 degrees to the side. (By the next day it was pivoted again to be facing downwards, awaiting the integration of the ISIM scientific instrument module.)

I was fortunate that (a) someone informed me of this very narrow time window on that day and (b) I had my digital SLR with me (not just an iPhone). [Unfortunately, I did not have my ultra-wide angle lens that day!]

As the mirror was about to be rotated 90 degrees, I was asked to take photos of John Mather, Senior Project Scientist of JWST (and a 2006 Nobel Laureate) taking a selfie of himself in the mirror with his iPhone!

In late May, I learned that a few of my photos from this day's events showed up on the JWST web site (portfolio version). Then on the last day of May, NASA announced the latest version of the Goddard View magazine, which elected to use my photo on the cover! (The Education & Public Outreach (EPO) team of JWST is unrelated to the Goddard View editorial staff.)

Two notes of interest on this photo:

• The photo used by Goddard View is a different one from the sequence than that used by the JWST web site.
• The Goddard View editors apparently used a 2.6 megapixel (1333x2000 pixel full frame, 1333x1025 when cropped) version of my photo that had been uploaded to the JWST Flickr site, and thus apparently upsampled it to produce a cover-quality image. (The original is a 20 megapixel image, 3648x5472 pixels or 3648x2804 (10.2MP) at this cropping.) [Update: from an email exchange with the editor, I learned that they simply stretched the image in Adobe InDesign to make it fit.]

Goddard View magazine web site.

Full-frame image:

Cropped to match above image:

This was all part of a sequence as the mirror moved from parallel to the observation window to 90 degrees to the window. In a photo a moment later (below), it was a self-portrait of me in the center of the mirror, with John's reflection now off to the left.

This image shows the stunningly beautiful mirror facing the observation window some minutes before the above photos were taken.

Telescope in vertical configuration on April 26, 2016. Note the people in bunny suits at the lower right for scale.