NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December 2021, has become humanity’s best tool to study the cosmos. On July 9th, Liberty Science Center was thrilled to welcome the Webb Telescope’s outreach team to join us to engage our guests in all that makes the telescope so great, both during the day and at LSC After Dark.

One of the most unique features of the telescope is the kind of light it sees. Visible light, what our eyes see, makes up just a small fraction of all the light that exists both on Earth and in space. JWST primarily observes infrared light, which allows it to see through cosmic dust to study the life cycles of stars as well as spot the most distant galaxies in the Universe. The JWST team onsite at LSC used a similar infrared camera to show us where we can find infrared light right here on Earth – any source of heat! Guests were able to see how they looked in infrared light, just how the James Webb Space telescope would see them.

During LSC After Dark, Mike Davis, project manager at NASA, took the stage in America’s largest planetarium for a Space Talk sharing the development process of JWST and the most spectacular images it has taken so far.