File:WR 124 (NIRCam) (52757287572).png

English: 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.