Christmas reflection

The Christmas tree is up at ESA’s ESTEC technical heart in the Netherlands, seen here reflected in the main mirror of a tenth scale model of the NASA-ESA-CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

The Christmas tree’s lights will have taken about 15 billionths of a second to travel to this multi-segment mirror, but the actual JWST’s 6.5 m mirror will observe cosmic sights from far further away.

Scheduled for launch by Ariane 5 in 2021, JWST is designed to collect almost six times more light than the current Hubble Space Telescope, peering back in infrared to the era of the first galaxies in the Universe and hunting out planets around other stars.