ESA's Gaia Observatory Snaps Photo Of Webb Telescope

Both the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) are now in the Lagrange point (L2) about 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth. Gaia has now captured a photo of its new neighbor.

Even before Webb reached its destination at L2 back in January, Gaia experts – Uli Bastian of Heidelberg University (Germany) and Francois Mignard of Nice Observatory (France) – had known that the telescope would be occasionally crossing Gaia's field of view, noted the ESA.

Gaia has been at L2 since 2014. And even though it's not really created to take pictures of celestial objects, its sky mapper allows it to take "sort of sky images." According to the agency, these "slices" are routinely deleted, but the computer can also be manually requested to keep image data.

The image was captured on Feb. 18 when the two spacecraft were a million kilometers apart. The raw data was downloaded to Earth after Gaia scanned the area of the sky where Webb was visible.

"Your 'candidates' can be safely renamed 'Webb,'" Bastian said after confirming Webb's presence in the photo.

In the image shared by the agency, one can see the patch of sky with some bright stars and the arrow pointing to Webb on the left side. It also shared a zoomed-in image, showing Webb as a faint speck of light.

According to the agency, Gaia will again get an opportunity to snap a photo of Webb in the future as it is constantly scanning the sky. In the coming years, it will happen "several dozen times."

However, this wasn't the first time that Webb was captured in a photo in its position in L2. In January, the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) also tracked it using its "Elena" robotic telescope just when it reached L2.

"We captured it from Earth to celebrate this very important moment!" the VTP tweeted.

"Gaia now has a spacecraft friend at L2, and together they will uncover our home galaxy, and the Universe beyond," the ESA noted.