Tarantula Nebula - JWST

Normally the Tarantula is a mass of swirling dust obscuring the massive star factory it really is. Now that the JWST can see through the dust we can now see stars being born in much finer details than we can at visual wavelengths.

At only 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, the Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group, the galaxies nearest our Milky Way. It is home to the hottest, most massive stars known. Astronomers focused three of Webb’s high-resolution infrared instruments on the Tarantula. Viewed with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the region resembles a burrowing tarantula’s home, lined with its silk.

This image was created from the raw data downloaded from the James Webb Space Telescope. There is over 4Gb of data in this image spread across the 4 infra-red wavebands that JWST captures on it's NIRCAM instrument. I have merged these 4 different bands into the 3 Red/Green/Blue visual light channels to create this image

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.