Gazing at the cosmos over the shoulders of space telescopes
The Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope are NASA’s two giant telescopes in space. They’re operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. These big eyes in the sky – located above Earth’s obscuring atmosphere – never stop exploring. All day long, on every day of the year that they’re not down for some sort of maintenance event, they’re looking outward from Earth, toward the cosmos.
Professional astronomers have to apply – and be accepted – for projects on these big space telescopes. If you’re curious about what astronomers looking at right now, using Hubble or the Webb, then good news! You can follow along as they search the skies for the next big discovery in astronomy at Space Telescope Live.
The website just got a major upgrade, and it couldn’t be simpler to use. Just click a button for the space scope of your choice and get all the insider information. You’ll learn …
What each telescope is looking at.
Where these targets are in the sky.
How the data are being gathered.
When the observations begin and end.
Who is leading the investigations.
Why each target is being investigated.
See what Hubble and Webb are seeing … sort of
For obvious reasons, STScI can’t stream imagery straight from space to your phone. Instead, it relies on Earth-side pictures:
The zoomable sky map centered on the target’s location was developed using the Aladin Sky Atlas, with imagery from ground-based telescopes to provide context for the observation. (Because the Hubble and Webb data must go through preliminary processing, and in many cases preliminary analysis, before being released to the public and astronomy community, real-time imagery is not available in this tool for either telescope.)
You get the raw data and some context too:
Information for observations from approved science programs is available via the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. NASA’s Space Telescope Live offers easy access to this information – not only the current day’s targets, but the entire catalog of past observations as well – with Webb records dating back to its first commissioning targets in January 2022, and Hubble records all the way back to the beginning of its operations in May 1990.
Bottom line: The recently redesigned Space Telescope Live webapp gives up-to-the-minute information about what the Hubble and Webb space telescopes are observing.
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