With an astronomer’s toolkit and an artist’s eye, Zoltan Levay has transformed raw data from the Hubble Space Telescope into stunning space vistas for almost a quarter century (SN: 4/18/15, p. 4). He’s now preparing for a new challenge: Working with light not visible to human eyes.
Levay’s next charge is the James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2019. Unlike Hubble, which mostly views the universe in visible light, Webb will observe in infrared, with wavelengths too long for human eyes to detect.
“We’re translating this invisible light into the visible range, so we can visualize it,” Levay says.
The switch is worth making because the telescope will see further back in time than Hubble — possibly to the universe’s first stars and galaxies, whose light has been stretched by cosmic expansion.