Launched on Christmas day 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is now heading for its duty location over a million miles from the Earth at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point. This location puts the scope in a heliocentric orbit with the Earth continually between the telescope and the Sun. At the L2 location, the Earth’s gravity pulls a much smaller object into an orbit faster than it normally would have, allowing it to match the Earth’s orbital period.
The JWST is optimized for infra-red imaging. Light from very early in the age of the expanding universe has been so stretched out over the aeons that it is too long to be seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). JWST is designed specifically for that frequency of light allowing the scope to see further into the past than the HST.
I used a JPL generated ephemeris to guide my scope last night and was able to catch the JWST on its way. The animation is seventy-five 60 second images. There were some quick moving clouds passing overhead but they weren’t dense enough to obscure the scopes progress.