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Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos
by Richard Panek.
Little, Brown, 2024 ($29)
Having already chronicled a history of telescopes in his 1998 book Seeing and Believing, science writer Richard Panek boldly writes one of the first books about the telescope: the James Webb Space Telescope. Like any good profiler, Panek gets up close and personal with his subject, describing each layer of its sunshield as “the length of a long tennis lob and the width of a tissue.” Woven into the narrative is the importance of the public in shaping the mission’s trajectory, from electing leadership who fund the nation’s space agency to bestowing Internet virality on JWST’s first-released images of other worlds.
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