After a long period of anticipation, the first coloured image from the James Webb Space Telescope has been released, with more to come later today (12 July).

The image shows the galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6bn years ago. The image is clustered with distant galaxies, with faint structures that have never been seen before, such as star clusters and “diffuse features”.

The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying more distant galaxies behind it.

Despite the immense detail in the image, NASA said this slice of the universe covers a patch of sky that is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.

The first image was unveiled at a US White House event, with US President Joe Biden describing the moment as “historic” and “hard to even fathom”.

The detail on the image is made possible thanks to advanced instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest and most powerful space observatory ever built. As a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST’s mission is to solve mysteries in the solar system, look to distant worlds around other stars and probe the origins of our universe.

Researchers will soon delve into the data behind these images to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions.

Sneak a peek at the deepest & sharpest infrared image of the early universe ever taken — all in a day’s work for the Webb telescope. (Literally, capturing it took less than a day!) This is Webb’s first image released as we begin to #UnfoldTheUniverse: https://t.co/tlougFWg8B pic.twitter.com/Y7ebmQwT7j

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) July 11, 2022

Last week, NASA scientists released an engineering test image of the observatory, which had a  “rough-around-the-edges” quality and was not optimised to be a science observation. That test image was taken by Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), which enables accurate science measurements and imaging with precision pointing.

However, the latest full quality image was taken by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), James Webb’s primary camera that simultaneously images the cosmos in two different infrared ranges.

The image is a composite made from 12.5 hours of images at different wavelengths, achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.

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