Photos: Webb Space Telescope marks first year making cosmic images

What a difference a year makes: The James Webb Space Telescope has provided new photos of the most distant planets in our solar system, refreshed our views on the universe with the sharpest infrared images of it yet and in its latest feat, shown us the star-forming region nearest to our home planet.

NASA on Wednesday marked the cosmic instrument’s first year of discovery and scientific operations by releasing a new, detailed view of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex — the closest star-forming area to Earth — exactly one year after broadcasting the first images made using the space telescope.

The $10 billion Webb Telescope was named after the man who led NASA’s Apollo program from 1961 to 1968 and it replaced its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched into low Earth orbit in 1990.

While Hubble captured the stars and our imaginations from approximately 332 miles away, the Webb telescope has spent the last year documenting space from a distance of almost one million miles from Earth.

Among its most stunning imagery from the last year are luminous, 150-million pixel photos that were made using a Bay Area-built camera known as the NIRCam, or Near-Infrared Camera, which teams of researchers began developing in 2002.

To make its pictures, Webb’s 18-paned mirror collects light from the sky and directs it to four instruments, including NIRCam, the main source of its visuals. Another instrument studies the composition of space material; a third guides and points the spacecraft.