This view of the V838 Monocerotis light echo uses color to show the passage of time. As the bright flash of light left the star, it illuminated the dust surrounding it, but because space is so big, we see actually see the light travelling and illuminating the dust as it goes along. Each time Hubble looked at the light echo, it revealed only one layer, like the layers of an onion. Here, I've combined multiple layers into a single view, with the innermost one colored red. Next, orange, followed by yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet. You could say red is the oldest light, and violet is the youngest. The result is a prismatic, rainbow-colored view of the dust cloud.
As a concept, light echoes are at first confusing, because we are not used to light being anything but an instant on or off. It's my hope that this image makes it a little less confusing, or at least offers one more way to try and understand the light echo. I also wanted to be able to view the dust cloud as a whole and try to make sense of the many flowing, liquidlike patterns within it.
I've removed the stars from each layer so that they wouldn't be too bright in the end result. Then I re-added them on their own isolated layer in white.
Views from March 2002 to September 2006 were used to create this image.
Red: 2002-05-20
Orange: 2002-09-02
Yellow: 2002-10-28
Gray: 2002-12-17
Green: 2004-02-08
Cyan: 2004-10-23
Blue: 2005 Oct, Nov, Dec (Multiple Dates)
Violet: 2006-09-09
(Still need to add observation IDs)
North is up.
Tags: light echo Monocerotis time rainbow F606W Hubble HST V838 Mon V838 Monocerotis dust stellar envelope space stars visible
I've done a lot of visualizations of Cas A over the past year plus, and I'm happy to be able to share one. This is one of my favorites! It shows the supernova remnant Cas A in multiwavelength infrared color from JWST, and x-ray from Chandra in cyan. Stars are visible light imagery from Hubble overlaid in their appropriate positions, largely invisible to infrared and x-ray telescopes.
Separated wavelength layers can be viewed at the Chandra website, along with a much more awesome description than I could ever come up with:
chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2024/casa/
There's also a NASA article!
www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-telescopes-chase-down-gre...
North is up.
Tags: supernova remnant x-ray jwst infrared Cas A Cassiopeia A visible stars galaxy local Milky Way explosion star elements astronomy science
Finally decided to finish up a version of my own for this beautiful planetary nebula. I did a LOT of cleaning up of the banding issues once again using the G'MIC noise debanding filter. I also decided to do something a little different with that central pool of soft but bright, hazy light. I used one of the filters to mostly remove it, revealing the central details more clearly. This leaves the overall image pretty heavy on the red and orange side of things, but I think it looks pretty cool like this.
This was, of course, part of the early release data after JWST was first launched. You can see the official version and learn a lot more about this planetary nebula over yonder: webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/033/01G70BGT...
Once upon a time, Hubble looked upon this nebula, as well... and I did a version of that, too. flic.kr/p/gJ3NzH
Central subtraction: JWST/NIRCam F405N-F444W
Red-Orange: JWST/NIRCam F444W-470N, F212N
Yellow: JWST/NIRCam F356W
Teal: JWST/NIRCam F187N
Blue: JWST/NIRCam F090W
North is 111.51° clockwise from up.
Tags: JWST planetary nebula infrared dust gas star NGC3132 3132
A color composite of JWST commissioning data and some earlier, coincidentally imaged HST data. The nucleus of the galaxy is blatantly active when viewed in infrared with JWST.
Red-orange: JWST/MIRI F560W
Blue-cyan: HST/ACS/WFC F814W
North is 123.96° clockwise from up.
Tags: JWST HST Hubble spiral galaxy stars AGN active galactic nucleus black hole space commissioning
The thing about NIRCam and wideband infrared filters in general is that you get stars. Lots of stars. Even though this nebula is a pretty bright nebula, it has a hard time competing with all the stars. I've done the best I could do to show the nebula despite this fact. I think it's worth zooming in to see the details better, because in the full view, stars are competing too hard with the nebula.
In particular, there are these interesting red "cometary" blobs that seem contained within little hollowed out parts of the bluer part of the nebula. These are very interesting, and difficult to see in any previous views of this nebula, from HST all the way up to JWST's other camera, the MIRI. I know the nebula is formed by dust created by the star and sculped by winds from the star, but I'm not sure how these red blobs and their hollowed bubbles work out. I might guess that the red blobs are themselves producing some kind of wind force that is hollowing out their own little parts of the nebula. Or perhaps they are collapsing? Anyway, not knowing everything is the fun part about astronomy.
There was a very bright diffraction spike from a star off the lower left of the detector which I spent a long time trying to get rid of. It's not a perfect solution, and some artifacts may be visible from this. I think it helped a lot to reduce the distraction from this rather annoying line that crossed the whole image.
I made a Behance project showing some of the steps I used to process this image.
Grayscale "screen" for overall brightness: NIRCam F444W
Red: NIRCam F335M
Green: NIRCam F210M
Teal: NIRCam F150W
Blue: NIRCam F090W
North is 40.56° clockwise from up.
Tags: Wolf-Rayet star dust expanding nebula JWST 124 dust factory