Letter Home
These images show the position of the Webb telescope as a small streak against the stars and, in the case of “Letter Home,” against the constellation Leo during the night of March 16, 2022, traveling at .2km/ sec, reflecting sunlight at a miniscule magnitude 16, sending back tiny packets of photons, communicating with me — like a letter home.
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about, and making drawings about, the physical object that is the telescope. This results in a bond with it that has spanned a distance ranging from 30 feet — the distance from which I first photographed it in the clean room — to its current distance of one million miles from Earth. After it reached its final solar orbital position, the common thought was that no one would ever see it again. But I discovered that a couple of amateur astronomers had the same desire I had, which was to find and image JSWT, and that they were able to do so using a relatively large telescope.
I don’t have a large telescope, so I had to invent an imaginary one of my own. Using positional data from NASA, adjusted for my home in Washington, I composed an imaginary astro-photograph.
I decided on a theoretical exposure of about 30 minutes which would produce a tiny streak of light across the image, showing the JWST traversing a fraction of the sky. I tried to make the path as thin and faint as I could to convey its small size compared to the vastness of space. I also wanted the drawing to be as accurate as possible, so I drew the correct stars in the background at the time of the drawing’s conception, with their appropriate magnitude and position. I also included some faint white lines indicating the visible constellations for reference.