On Christmas Day, 2021 the James Webb Space Telescope launched into space. The JWST is the largest optical telescope in space to date and also the most advanced. Less than two weeks ago, on July 11th, the public got to see the first image from the JWST and it was breathtaking. But the telescope itself is also quite beautiful, making it a fantastic example of function as form. YouTuber Cellar Nerd wanted to bring the beauty of both the telescope and its images into his home, so he built this recreation of the JWST as an art piece.

The JWST’s most striking feature is the massive 21 foot-diameter primary telescope mirror, which contains 18 individual hexagonal segments arranged in a honeycomb pattern. The JWST’s engineers designed the primary mirror this way so that it could fold up into a package small enough to fit on an Ariane 5 heavy-lift launch vehicle. The honeycomb pattern and the gold-plated beryllium mirror segments give the JWST its distinctive look and that is what Cellar Nerd chose to focus on replicating.

The mirrors on this JWST art piece came from Amazon and are advertised as wall art. They are plastic and therefore inappropriate for true optical use, but their gold coloring makes them perfect for this project. Once he received the mirrors, Cellar Nerd used their dimensions to lay out the honeycomb pattern in an Autodesk Fusion 360 CAD model. With that CAD model as a reference, he cut the mirror backing panel out of plywood using a jigsaw. That plywood then got a solid coat of matte black paint.

Cellar Nerd’s next step was to attach all of the mirrors to the plywood, omitting the center hexagon. In the actual JWST, that’s where the sensors sit. On this art piece, however, an LCD screen salvaged from a laptop fills that space. The LCD connects to a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and shows images captured by the real JWST. The result is an art piece that shows the beauty of the JWST and the cosmos that we can see thanks to its groundbreaking technology.