The image dazzles from a computer screen in the corner of the room: six beams of red-orange light bursting from a luminous Milky Way star.
But the most entrancing part of the picture — among the public’s first dispatches from the revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope — lies in the background, where amorphous blobs are really swirling galaxies.
From a desk across the room in Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute, astronomical optics scientist Charles LaJoie zooms in, and even more cloudlike spirals appear, once concealed in the reaches of space.
