NASA's James Webb Telescope Just Revealed The Best Space Photo Ever & Here's What It Shows

If you want to feel small, just sit for a moment and really soak in the new photo from NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope.

Scientists recently brought the world's new super-powerful telescope online, and on Monday night, they shared its very first full-colour photo of the universe.

And just... wow.

The image shows a universe exploding with light — and not in a Star Wars smattering of stars, either. The Webb photo is filled with distant galaxies, white-hot stars and vibrant nebulas.

NASA is calling the photo Webb's First Deep Field, and it captures a whole cluster of galaxies, including many that humans have never seen before.

"Many of the extremely distant galaxies in this field don't yet have names, nor are they formally catalogued," NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute tweeted. "This is the first time we've detected them!"

And the wildest part? This isn't a pic of our entire sky. Instead, the telescope captured this cluster of galaxies by looking at a "patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground," NASA says.

In other words, space is mind-blowingly big.

NASA says it took the photo using Webb's special Near-Infrared Camera. While the telescope is our most cutting-edge to date, it actually took 12.5 hours to capture this single photo — much like an old-time camera from 1900.

The image itself is also pretty retro because light takes a long time to travel from a distant star to Earth's telescopes. In this case, NASA says the Webb snapshot shows those distant galaxies as they would've appeared 4.6 billion years ago.

The photo was released Monday as a teaser for a bigger event Tuesday when NASA dropped the rest of its camera roll.

The new pics included several more incredible discoveries, including the first-ever evidence of water and clouds around a distant planet.

NASA also revealed a stunning pic of a dying star, which looks like something you might see on a deep-sea dive or under a powerful microscope.

This is only just a taste of what we'll get to see in the years ahead, according to Chris Hadfield, former commander of the International Space Station.

"It's going to be able to see atmospheres around planets that are orbiting other stars," he told Narcity in an interview last month. "We may show that there is life on a planet orbiting (another star)."

The James Webb Space Telescope launched late last year and recently came online as a new and improved replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope.

That means we're only just getting started with this thing, and there will be many more incredible photos to come.

In the meantime, I'm making this one the new lock screen on my phone.

So cool!