First Images from WFST
China's capabilities in Astronomy has come on in leaps and bounds of the last decade, and the new WFST (Wide Field Survey Telescope) is the latest of such.
While a huge amount of technical investment has gone into telescopes seeing further (Hubble / JWST), one of the real areas lacking in Astronomy is the ability to watch the night sky over a wide area of coverage at once. Similar projects in LATAM have been undertaken, to record much more broader areas and save this data for future interrogation, WFST adds to this being based in the Northern Hemisphere.
So while Hubble and JWST can focus on that tiny dot in the above image and create a huge galaxy field from it, telescopes like this don't seek to record the finer detail, but rather, larger areas of sky over time.
Above is the Andromeda Galaxy from WFST, it's still a good amount of detail, being able to see the spiral structure and M32 (the bright elliptical galaxy straight down from the galaxy centre, and M110 the dwarf galaxy above the spiral disk in this image.
The hope for this is to catch transitory events such as nova, supernova, passing meteors and to collect a more regular observation of the night sky in general, hopefully catching tiny changes which would normally take a lot more observation to spot.
