Exploring a Random Place taken by the JWST

I was looking through the targets the JWST imaged when I came across something unusual: a target called “random place”. I was intrigued by the target’s name and took a closer look at the JWST archive and saw that the images were taken in an unremarkable part of the sky. This is the Digital Sky Survey image of the region:

 The field of view is just a bunch of stars, but I thought I’d take a closer look and downloaded one of the observations and found this image:

 It is obviously a rough image because you can see where the mosaic is incomplete – the black line in the center of the image. The image appeared to just be made up of stars, but I zoomed in and was amazed at what I found!

 I found a lot of galaxies in the image – here’s a sample of one of the clusters of galaxies in the image:

 There are at least 10 galaxies in the image!

 Here’s another group of galaxies, arranged in a symmetric pattern that looks like three distinct lines of galaxies:

 Here’s another cluster of galaxies with some of the members very close to one another:

 Here’s a compact group of galaxies – they appear to form a group, and the two in the center appear to be interacting:

 Here’s an interacting pair of galaxies:

 A spiral galaxy:

 A distorted galaxy:

 Another cluster of galaxies:

 And there are more galaxies in the image that I haven’t highlighted!

What an amazing part of the sky and the JWST team called it a “random place” that turns out to be rich with galaxies. Amazing what’s in the sky and yet to be discovered, and all thanks to the JWST team for making it possible!