// block 744711 · space · 12 July 2022
Webb's first full-colour images
The moment this block marks: the start of the NASA broadcast releasing the images, 10:30 in Maryland, 12 July 2022, 14:30:00 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 744,711, 12 July 2022, 14:34:29 UTC.
Six and a half months after its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope was ready to show what it could do. On the evening of 11 July 2022, at the White House, President Joe Biden revealed the first of its full-colour images: Webb's First Deep Field, the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, crowded with thousands of galaxies, some of them the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared.
The patch of sky in that image is about the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Webb gathered it in 12.5 hours of exposures, where Hubble had needed weeks to reach comparable depths.
The rest came the next morning. At 10:30 EDT on 12 July, NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency began a broadcast from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland that released the full set: the Carina Nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula, the galaxies of Stephan's Quintet, and a spectrum of the exoplanet WASP-96 b, Webb's first detection of water in the atmosphere of a planet beyond the solar system. That evening the images filled the screens of Times Square and Piccadilly Circus.
The first block mined after the broadcast began, block 744,711, came four minutes in, at 14:34:29 UTC, while the release was only starting. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.
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