Pillars of Creation

This is the JWST capture of the Pillars of Creation, an area of the Eagle Nebula made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope with images released in 1995. This image was created by downloading the raw data from the JWST Data archive and mapping the 3 mid infrared channels to the visible channels. The JWST archive has 4 different images taken with different IR filters (f090, f187, f335 and f444) - each image captures it's own level of detail.

When these images are mapped to a specific visible colour and then combined into a single image the outcome presents an almost infinite number of possibilities. In this image I wanted to get the stars in a golden hue and the remaining dust and gas clouds in a complementary saphire blue colour. The F090 image captures those immense star spikes (they are almost non-existant in the other images).

The F187 and F335 images are almost identical in the detail they capture, so I selected just the F335 image. Two similar images can wash out detail in the other images in the stack. The F444 image can peer through the dust and gas to show finer details within the clouds. The recipe for this image is F090 = Gold, F335 = Teal and F444 = a counter-intuitive Maroon.

Image produced from raw data downloaded from MAST: the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes

Original image by ESA/Hubble, alignment, integration and colour mapping by Arc Fortnight.