James Webb Space Telescope pumpkin stencils can add cosmic mystery to Halloween

The Canadian Space Agency has instructions for anyone looking to make their carved pumpkin look a little more spaced out this October

Fans of genre mashups can bring a little cosmic mystery into their spooky Halloween season using new pumpkin carving stencils featuring the James Webb Space Telescope.

Offered for free with instructions on the Canadian Space Agency website, the three stencils provide three levels of difficulty for people looking to carve up their gourd in recognition of the pioneering new space telescope.

The easiest stencil provides a guide for creating an outline of the Webb telescope itself, with its diamond-shaped sun shield and large primary mirror. The progressively more difficult stencils recreate Webb’s already iconic hexagonally segmented primary mirror, with the third and most difficult stencil adding a spider web to the Webb mirror outline.

The actual Webb telescope mirror is more than 21 feet across and composed of 18 golden, beryllium segments, and could hold a lot of pumpkins. It’s the largest mirror ever flown on a space telescope, dwarfing the 7.8-foot-diameter primary mirror of the venerable Hubble Space Telescope.

A project of Nasa, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb telescope launched on Christmas Day in 2021 and returned its first public images on 6 July, including stunning images of distant galaxies and glowing nebulae. The telescope has gone on to reveal some of the oldest stars ever observed, the glowing halo of the planet Neptune, distant exoplanets around other suns, and a new image of the Pillars of Creation, a stunning portion of the Eagle Nebular first imaged by Hubble in 1995.

The pumpkin carving templates are not the only spooky space-themed space agency activity this October.

Nasa has also gotten in the act, changing the name of its exoplanets account on the social media website Twitter to “Nasa Hexoplanets“ and sharing spooky art to accompany descriptions of very real extreme planets and features of the universe that might fit right at home in a horror story. Exoplanets such as HD 189733b, a blue gas giant with 5,400-mile-per-hour winds blowing clouds of glass shards.

Terrestrial pumpkin carving is a bit safer, but the Canadian Space Agency recommends you exercise caution when using a sharp knife to carve your gourd.