A beautiful photo of the James Webb space telescope flying into deep space

Astronomers have caught a glimpse of the landmark James Webb space telescope, now 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, which was launched from Earth on 25 December on board an Ariane 5 rocket. 

On 24 January, the most advanced space telescope ever launched by researchers to gather information from the oldest period of the universe reached its destination. Intended as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will begin scientific investigations in June, taking images of the L2 Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometres between the Earth and the Sun, over a period of about five to ten years.

The project, called the Virtual Telescope Project, has already also made earlier picture of James Webb going into deep space, and now again published on a photo of astronomers. The telescope was about 1.4 million kilometres from the planet when it was captured by a telescope near Rome, called Elena.

And here you can see the same thing enlarged, with the tiny arrow indicating the telescope.

The incredibly complex James Webb is gathering information from the earliest days of the universe, exploring the cosmos in the infrared, largely absorbed by our planet's atmosphere, the planets and moons of the Solar System, and the oldest and most distant galaxies. Thousands of researchers, including the Hungarian astronomer Peter Abraham, Tamás Szalai and their colleagues.