NASA released the first images from the new James Webb Space Telescope last week that launched on Christmas Day.

The telescope was able to peer back over 13 billion years to capture a snapshot of what the early universe looked like.

It’s some of the first galaxies formed after the big bang.  

Michele Powers was able to chat with Joseph DePasquale, a senior image developer who processed these images for astronomers and the public. Here’s his experience with working on them.  

“It suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at the first real color image from the Webb Space Telescope,” says DePasquale. “The beauty, the depth of color, the clarity, the detail that I could see in this image… just blew me away. For the first time I was like this is really the successor to Hubble, these images are incredible, and this is going to change astronomy forever.”