From the roof of Africa, Mt Kilimanjaro, let’s fly out to almost 5 billion light years away, where a galaxy cluster is revealed by NASA's James Webb in its first Deep Field image; the sharpest infrared image of the universe so far and just the beginning for the space telescope that is placed a million miles away from Earth. Music by composer Barbad Bayat.
Mind-blowing facts: the video begins with a wide angle view that I photographed in southern Kenya. It has a similar angle to our eyes field of view. The Webb Deep Field is several thousand times smaller; the angular size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. In my second image, using a telephoto lens, the square marking the deep field area in the southern constellation Volans is still extremely small, and shows just a blank background when zoomed in. The objects here are so faint and distant that the field may remain blank to a professional telescope. Thousands of galaxies - including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared - appears in this 12-hour total exposure by Webb. The galaxy cluster is SMACS 0723. Its light belongs to 4.6 billion years ago when Earth was just about to form. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it and distort their image to extended arcs.
