our home is so smol 🥺

The eight point speculars are from the JWST’s segmented mirrors. In total, so large, no spacecraft could launch them unfolded. It orbits the sun, not the earth, in small pocket behind the earth, of almost pure lack of gravity. It hides behind a stretched many-layered Mylar mirror designed to reflect away any heat coming from behind so the images are not distorted. The mathematics, engineering and organization necessary to even create this photograph is almost as stunning as the result.

- I find it a useful practice, when my parochial problems loom large, to remind myself, (living near the sea), that there are calculated to be more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in all this world we inhabit.