JWST 05/01/2022 Variation in brightness

Forums General Discussion Following JWST through Orion to L2 JWST 05/01/2022 Variation in brightness

#585093
Philip Masding
Participant

I imaged JWST on 05/1/2022 for just over an hour and in that time its brightness seemed to vary quite a bit as seen in this stack:

This graph shows the brightness of JWST over the period compared to 3 other field stars of similar brightness

I was wondering what caused this variation because I assumed the spacecraft is not rotating and that the change in viewing angle over this time period would not be that great.