The forthcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope offers unprecedented new opportunities for astronomers. It’s also a timely opportunity to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes have shown us. Astronomers rarely use their telescopes to simply take pictures. The pictures in astrophysics are usually generated by a process of scientific inference and imagination, sometimes visualized in the artist’s impressions of what the data suggests. Choosing just a handful of images was not easy. I limited my selection to images produced by publicly-funded telescopes and which reveal some interesting science. I tried to avoid very popular images which have…

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