NASA’s latest space telescope is wide awake, has taken its lens cap off, and has sent back its first image. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) – which launched on 14 December 2009 – has provided what is really a test snap, but beautiful nonetheless.

When the survey-proper begins, WISE will take pictures once every 11 seconds until October this year, when the frozen hydrogen being used to cool its detectors runs out. In that time it should spot hundreds of millions of objects, and make about 1.5 sweeps of the sky.

Like the Spitzer telescope, WISE looks in the infrared. But where Spitzer had a narrow field of view tuned for specific point objects, WISE conducts wide-field surveys. This picture, for example, covers a patch of sky about three times larger than the full moon (NASA press release). Usually the telescope will always be on the move, as Bad Astronomy explains, but for this calibration it stared for 8 seconds at one patch of sky, a region in the constellation Carina near the Milky Way.

“Every dot in that patch is undoubtedly interesting for some reason or another,” WISE mission scientist David Leisawitz tells Science News.

The pic was released at the AAS meeting in Washington DC – Nature’s Eric Hand is reporting from the conference.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA