Serpens Nebula (NIRCam compass Image)

This image of the Serpens Nebula, captured by Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), 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. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to the direction of arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).

The scale bar is labelled in light-years, which is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year. One light-year is equal to about 9.46 trillion kilometres, or 5.88 trillion miles.

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 colour of each filter name is the visible light colour used to represent the infrared light that passes through that filter.

[Image description: At the centre of the image is a nebula against the black background of space. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The centre of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field; the brightest sources in the field have the  eight-pointed diffraction spikes characteristic of Webb images. At lower left, a white arrow pointing in the 8 o’clock direction is labelled N for north, while an arrow pointing in the 5 o‘clock direction is labelled E for east. At top right, a scale bar is labelled .25 light-years. At the bottom is a list of NIRCam filters in different colours, from left to right: F140M (blue), F210M (cyan), F360W (orange), F480M (red).]