Find out what the premier space telescopes are looking at right now with NASA’s Space Telescope Live.
The images released by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have profoundly changed our perception of the Universe, but do you ever wonder when those images were captured, or what Webb and Hubble are looking at right now?
Could Hubble be capturing a wide-field view of a dusty star-forming nebula in deep space, or perhaps capturing another wonderful image of Jupiter?
What about Webb? Maybe it’s gathering data on the remnants of an exploded star or observing galaxies so far away, they existed when the Universe was in its infancy.
NASA has released a new web application called Space Telescope Live, which reveals what either Webb or Hubble is observing right now, including the target’s name, its category, the goals of the observing programme and when observations began.
It also reveals when the next observing session is due to begin.
The application reveals exactly where the Webb and Hubble targets are in the sky – should you wish to find them yourself! – and what instruments are being used to capture the images, spectra and other data.
It shows how long the observations are scheduled to run, who is leading the study and what the astronomers are trying to discover.
The app was developed for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and was originally conceived in 2016.
True to NASA’s open data-sharing policy, it is also possible to explore the archives of observations by famous observatories such as Webb, Hubble, TESS, Kepler and, in the future, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.
You can access this via the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.
Find out what Webb and Hubble are observing now via What is Webb Observing? and What is Hubble Observing?