Picture of the Month 2026

22 January 2026
This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month brings us a scene from the distant Universe. Pictured here is the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223, or MACS J1149 for short, which is located about 5 billion light-years away in the constellation Leo. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the Universe that are held together by gravity. Astronomers have confirmed more than 300 galaxies belonging to the MACS J1149 cluster, and they’ve identified several hundred more possible members. At the cluster’s centre, a huddle of ghostly elliptical galaxies rules over the cluster with their immense gravity. The crushing gravity of this cluster does more than just hold all the galaxies together as they drift through space. As light from galaxies located behind the cluster makes its way toward our telescope, journeying for billions of years, its path through spacetime is bent by the mass of the intervening galaxies. This …