The Exciting First Years and the Upcoming Long Legacy of the James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope is the culmination of thirty years of planning, twenty years of construction, and ~11 billion dollars of funding, and for the past ~20 months it has been dazzling astronomers and the public alike with spectacular early science images. It is the most expensive and complex astronomical observatory ever built and it was designed specifically to perform superlative new observations, such as the first systematic exploration of stars, galaxies, and black holes in the early universe, or detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets. Luckily for us, this first systematic exploration is happening right now. I will provide an overview of this flagship telescope and discuss some of the early, and sometimes tentative, discoveries that have been made in Webb's first deep fields from the first light of galaxies and black holes, and finish by touching on some of the exciting scientific directions JWST is likely to probe in the near future.