Cas A (NIRCam compass image)

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

The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky.

The scale bar is labeled in light-years, which is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year (it takes 3 years for light to travel a distance equal to the length of the scale bar). One light-year is equal to about 9.46 trillion kilometers.

This image shows invisible near-infrared wavelengths of light that are represented by visible-light colours. The colour key shows which NIRCam filters were used when collecting the light. The colour of each filter name is the visible-light colour used to represent the infrared light that passes through that filter.

[Image description: The image shows a roughly circular cloud of gas and dust with a complex structure. At lower left, a white arrow pointing in the 2 o’clock direction is labelled N for north, while an arrow pointing in the 10 o‘clock direction is labelled E for east. At lower right, a scale bar is labelled 3 light-years and 1 arcminute. At the bottom is a list of MIRI filters in different colours, from left to right: F162M (blue), F356W (green), and F444W (red).]