February 2026: JWST Catalogue Expanded to 85 Observations
The JWST Explorer catalogue grew from 14 to 85 observations — covering NIRCam, MIRI, and NIRSpec targets across nebulae, galaxies, star clusters, and planetary systems.
February 2026: JWST Catalogue Expanded to 85 Observations
The JWST Explorer launched with 14 curated observations. This week we expanded the catalogue to 85 confirmed JWST targets — a 6× increase — spanning the full range of instruments and science categories that the James Webb Space Telescope has observed since its first science images in July 2022.
What Changed
The catalogue lives in src/services/mast-api.ts as a static list of Observation objects. Each entry maps to a verified NASA image URL and carries rich metadata: instrument, wavelength band, object category, coordinates, and a short description.
Before this expansion, the explorer was dominated by the "greatest hits" — Carina Nebula, Pillars of Creation, the JWST First Deep Field. Accurate, but not representative of the breadth of Webb's science programme.
New Additions by Category
Nebulae (Star-Forming Regions)
Webb sees through dust clouds invisible to Hubble. Additions include the Orion Nebula Bar (a protoplanetary disk nursery), the Tarantula Nebula 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud, NGC 3324 Cosmic Cliffs, and the Chamaeleon I molecular cloud — showing protostars still embedded in their birth clouds.Galaxies & Galaxy Groups
The extragalactic programme is where Webb truly shines in the mid-infrared. We added:- Cartwheel Galaxy (MIRI composite — ring structure formed by a collision 440 million years ago)
- Stephan's Quintet (five interacting galaxies, one of the largest JWST images released)
- NGC 7318 merger pair within Stephan's Quintet
- Phantom Galaxy M74 (MIRI+HST composite, perfect face-on spiral)
- Multiple high-redshift galaxy candidates from the CEERS and PRIMER surveys
Planetary Nebulae
The Southern Ring Nebula (NGC 3132) revealed a second faint companion star responsible for shaping the nebula — invisible to Hubble. Added both the NIRCam and MIRI versions as separate catalogue entries to illustrate how different wavelengths reveal different structures in the same object.Star Clusters & Stellar Evolution
Westerlund 1, NGC 346 in the SMC, and the dense Cosmic Cliffs ridge — regions where hundreds of young stellar objects are actively forming and can be counted individually for the first time.Solar System
Webb has observed solar system targets too: Neptune's rings (seen clearly for the first time since Voyager 2 in 1989) and Jupiter's auroras at the poles in NIRCam/F212N.Image Proxy Fix
Alongside the catalogue expansion, we fixed a production bug where the centre viewport of the JWST Explorer showed solid black. The root cause: plain <img> tags bypass Next.js's image-loader.js in production. Fix: route all image src attributes through /api/image-proxy?url=... in production builds, keeping direct URLs in development.
class="code-keyword">const proxiedImageUrl = useMemo(() => {
class="code-keyword">if (!currentImageUrl) class="code-keyword">return ''
class="code-keyword">if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
class="code-keyword">return class="code-string">/api/image-proxy?url=${encodeURIComponent(currentImageUrl)}
}
class="code-keyword">return currentImageUrl
}, [currentImageUrl])Loading and error states were also added — a spinner while the image loads and a fallback message if the NASA CDN is unreachable.
Service Worker Precaching Fix
The Vercel deploy logs showed a service worker installation failure on every deploy:
workbox bad-precaching-response: _next/app-build-manifest.json returned 404Next.js App Router generates _next/app-build-manifest.json as an internal build artefact — it's never publicly served. next-pwa was trying to precache it, causing the SW install to fail silently. Fix: add it (and related manifest files) to buildExcludes in next.config.js.
What's Next
With 85 observations in the catalogue, the next step is making them discoverable. The Explore page already supports filtering by wavelength (infrared, visible, radio) — but JWST's power is in multi-wavelength composites. A side-by-side wavelength comparison mode would let users see the same target in NIRCam vs MIRI, showing how the instrument choice changes what's visible.