First Images From NASA's SPHEREx

Some of the first images from NASA's SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) mission were captured March 27, 2025. Although the new images are uncalibrated and not yet ready to use for science, they give a tantalizing look at SPHEREx's wide view of the sky. Each bright spot is a source of light, like a star or galaxy, and each image is expected to contain more than 100,000 detected sources. There are six images in every SPHEREx exposure – one for each detector. The top three images show the same area of sky as the bottom three images; this is the observatory's full field of view, a rectangular area about 20 times wider than the full Moon. When the SPHEREx observatory begins routine science operations in April, it will take approximately 600 exposures every day. SPHEREx detects infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. To make the images shown here, science team members assigned a visible color to each infrared wavelength captured by the observatory. With each detector capturing 17 unique infrared wavelength bands, there are 102 hues in this image. To detect so many infrared colors, SPHEREx uses color filters s

Date

2025-04-01

Photographer / author

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Collection

JPL

Archive

NASA Image and Video Library

Type

photograph

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