Protostar L1527 (Annotated)

This image of the nebula L1527, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and colour key for reference.

The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).

The scale bar is labelled in astronomical units (au), which is the average distance between Earth and the Sun, or 150 million kilometres.

This image shows invisible near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colours. The colour key shows which NIRCam filters were used when collecting the light. The name of each filter is shown in the visible light colour used to represent the infrared light that passes through that filter.