Over the past twenty five years, the Hubble Telescope has been capturing exquisite pictures from the earliest years of the Universe. The New James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), working in the lower infra-red band will see through the dust clouds that even Hubble could not penetrate capturing pictures of young warm exoplanets and the spectroscopy of their atmospheres, identifying and characterizing the first galaxies at long red shifts and analyzing the warm dust and molecular gas in young stars 13 billion years ago. Meanwhile, in back gardens around the world, amateur astronomers with budgets rather smaller than Hubble and JWST, capture pictures that are also truly remarkable, bearing comparison with Hubble imaging and the work done in the early 1950’s at Mount Palomar and other great observatories.
Gordon showed us what we can see on a clear night in Cambridge and how the latest image processing technology enables us to de-twinkle a star-studded sky. The same technology is being applied to establish space to ground optical links that will take us even further back to the distant past.
