How we sharpened the James Webb telescope's vision from a million kilometers away
After Christmas dinner in 2021, our family was glued to the television, watching the nail-biting launch of NASA's US$10 billion (AU$15 billion) James Webb Space Telescope. There had not been such a leap forward in telescope ...
Six months later, Webb's first images were revealed, of the most distant galaxies yet seen. However, for our team in Australia, the work was only beginning.
We would be using Webb's highest-resolution mode, called the aperture masking interferometer or AMI for short. It's a tiny piece of precisely machined metal that slots into one of the telescope's cameras, enhancing its resolution.
Our results on painstakingly testing and enhancing AMI are now released on the open-access archive arXivin a pairof papers. We can finally present its first successful observations of stars, planets, moons and even black hole jets.
A 'selfie' taken during Webb's testing on Earth. Credit: Ball Aerospace
A map of the HD 206893 system. The colorful spots show the likelihood of there being an object at that position, while B and C show the known positions of the companion planets. The wider blob means the position of C is less precisely measured, as it’s much fainter than B. This is simplified from the full version presented in the paper. Credit: Desdoigts et al, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2510.09806
Jupiter’s moon Io, seen by AMI on Webb. Four bright spots are visible; they are volcanoes, exactly where expected, and rotate with Io over the hour-long timelapse. Credit: Max Charles