Defocused Stars of Orion with JWST
This image is of the constellation Orion with its stars defocused, showing their spectra and magnitudes.
Last year, I finally acquired a telescope, but it is not powerful enough, by far, to see the distant JWST, located a million miles from Earth, so I have been using it to view a variety of bright stars. I discovered that, instead of focusing properly on a star, which results in a small whitish dot, I can defocus my telescope so the image of the star is blurry. That makes the star’s light spread out and its colors more apparent, creating an abstract composition.
After consulting the positional data for the Webb telescope, which NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory makes public, I learned that the telescope would be traversing the constellation Orion in November of 2025. I included its trajectory in this piece, adding a faint line, visible above the hunter Orion’s head.
