NASA has released the very first image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, and while it isn't the glorious, sweeping nebula we are all waiting for, it is incredibly exciting.

It is a mosaic of 18 scattered, blurry dots of light against a black background. Each of those dots is the exact same star (HD 84406), captured independently by each of Webb's 18 unaligned mirror segments.

This proves that starlight has successfully travelled through the entire optical pathway and hit the NIRCam detector.

Over the coming weeks, engineers will use microscopic actuators on the back of each mirror segment to slowly merge those 18 points of light into a single, razor-sharp focus.

Scientific Visualization Studio: Webb Mirror Alignment Animations