The Best James Webb Space Telescope Images So Far – extremetech.com
2025-04-22T14:47:52Z
Webb has two decades ahead of it, but it’s already captured some stunning images. Here are 35 of our favorites.
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
The James Webb Space Telescope was late to launch, but the observatory is making up for lost time. After several years of operation, Webb has captured some truly stunning cosmic vistas, complete with a raft of scientific data that has helped scientists advance their understanding of the universe. The telescope may operate for 20 years, and it’s off to a good start. Let’s take a look at the best of Webb so far. Here, in no particular order, are 35 of the best Webb images we’ve seen to date.
1. Webb Deep Field
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Among the very first things NASA did with the operational Webb telescope was recreate one of the most iconic Hubble photos of all time. The Webb Deep Field is the deepest infrared view of the universe ever produced, revealing thousands of galaxies in an area of the sky the size of a grain of rice held at arm’s length. Some of the galaxies in this image are 13.1 billion years old, captured as they appeared when the universe had only just cooled enough to allow star formation.
2. Jupiter
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Did you know Jupiter had rings? They’re not as prominent as Saturn’s, but Jupiter’s massive gravity has pulled in enough material to give it a few. Most telescopes can’t resolve the planet’s faint rings, but Webb can. In the summer of 2022, scientists imaged Jupiter with Webb, complete with rings and glowing auroras at both poles.
3. Neptune
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Speaking of rings, Neptune has them, too, but they’re even harder to spot. The JWST operates in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns with its NIRCam, so the planet doesn’t look deep blue as it does in most photos, but the rings are very clear. No space probes have visited Neptune since Voyager-2 in the late 1980s. So, this was the first time in 30 years that anyone had seen a hint of Neptune’s rings
4. Saturn
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Saturn did not escape Webb’s notice. NASA is still working to clean up the observations, but it has released a preliminary view of the ringed planet. This image features Saturn as seen in the NIRCam filter F323N (3.23 microns). NASA processed this monochrome image and color-mapped it to a dark orange hue. Saturn is darker than the rings because the methane in its atmosphere absorbs most of the light that hits it.
5. Uranus
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
The planet Uranus was the last gas giant to get the Webb treatment. In late 2023, NASA released this NIRCam mage of the ice giant, showing the planet’s faint rings, as well as several of its moons, including Ariel, Miranda, Titania, Umbriel, Belinda, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Perdita, Portia, Puck, and Rosalind. NASA believes studying Uranus can help us better understand ice giant exoplanets in other solar systems.
6. Exoplanet HIP 65426 b
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Webb’s planet peeping is not limited to our own solar system. Webb captured its first image of an exoplanet in 2022 when it turned to the star HIP 65426. There, Webb detected the exoplanet HIP 65426 b. Webb did have a few things going for it. The exoplanet is about nine times the size of Jupiter, and its orbit takes it three times as far from its star as Neptune is from the sun. That helped scientists pick out the planet in the star’s haze, but it’s still an impressive feat for Webb.
7. Phantom Galaxy
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Some 32 million light-years away, a galaxy known as M74 or the “Phantom Galaxy” is aligned so we can look down on the full glory of its spiral structure. This swirl of stars may be similar to our own Milky Way galaxy, with a diameter of 100,000 light years and an estimated 100 billion stars. Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) allowed scientists to look through the dust and gas to see the ghostly structure of the galaxy. Webb was even able to image the nuclear star cluster at the galaxy’s center.
8. Pillars of Creation
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Naturally, the Webb Telescope team wasted no time revisiting probably the most well-known Hubble subject, the Pillars of Creation. These structures, the largest of which is five light-years tall, are part of the Eagle Nebula, an active star-forming region about 6,000 light-years away. The enormous pillars of gas are studded with luminous points of light from newly formed stars. Webb’s NIRCam instrument can see many more stars than Hubble, as well as an eerie red glow in areas where bright young stars are energizing hydrogen atoms.
9. Pillars of Creation (MIRI)
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Webb doesn’t see the universe as we do—it operates outside of the visual spectrum in the infrared, and it can image the same object in different spectra to gather more data. The previous image shows the Pillars in near-infrared, but Webb also took a look in mid-infrared with its MIRI instrument. The darker regions indicate denser and cooler gas. Stars don’t shine as brightly in mid-infrared, so most of the hot, young stars are not visible. However, we do see several blue and white stars shining through.
10. The Crab Nebula
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, T. Temim (Princeton University)
The Crab Nebula is about as famous as a space cloud can get—it’s been imaged by most telescopes, including Webb. This image shows the supernova remnant 6,500 light-years away in incredible detail. The red-orange sections indicate the presence of ionized sulfur, the blue is ionized iron, the yellow and green areas are dust, and the white parts indicate synchrotron emission from electrons interacting with the cloud’s magnetic field. Near the center of the image, you can even make out the pulsar that was once a full-fledged star before exploding to create the cloud we see today.
11. Stephan’s Quintet
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
This collection of five galaxies, discovered in 1877, was the first known compact galaxy group. Four of these galaxies are in close physical association, and astronomers believe they will one day merge. One of the objects, NGC 7318, is already giving us a preview. This object is actually two galaxies in the midst of merging. The image was captured with Webb’s MIRI instrument, which reveals the contours of dust within the galaxies.
12. Cosmic Penguin
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
NASA celebrated two years of Webb operations by releasing a rather whimsical image, the so-called “Penguin and Egg.” The spiral galaxy that makes up the penguin (NGC 2936) has been gravitationally disrupted, causing it to fly apart in a vaguely penguin shape. The “egg” is another galaxy (NGC 2937) with a compact elliptical shape and a large number of very old stars. The image uses data from Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI instruments.
13. Protostar L1527
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
In late 2022, researchers released an image of a young protostar known as L1527. The image, captured with Webb’s NIRCam, shows an hourglass-shaped cloud extending from the star in the middle. The turbulent protostar periodically ejects material as it grows, and the glowing hourglass shape shows the outlines of cavities created by these bursts. The blue areas are where dust is thinner, and the orange indicates thicker layers. You can also see a protoplanetary disk as a dark band right across the middle of the star.
14. Wolf-Rayet Star WR 124
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Wolf–Rayet stars are of great interest to astronomers, who believe they might hold the key to understanding why there’s so much dust in the universe. These stars don’t live long, but they spend their short lives belching out a nebula of dust and gas. The nebula around WR 124 is known as M1–67, and Webb’s infrared eyes (NIRCam and MIRI) revealed never-before-seen details of the clouds.
15. Einstein Ring Organics
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
The Webb telescope can see objects at an incredible distance, but sometimes it needs a little help. Gravitational lensing can magnify distant objects, sometimes distorting the light to produce so-called Einstein Rings. That’s what Webb spotted earlier this year—a galaxy 12 billion light-years away lensed by one just 3 billion light-years away. The more distant galaxy appears as a ring around the closer one due to the lensing effect. The upshot is that Webb was able to analyze the spectra from the background galaxy, finding evidence of organic materials.
16. Extreme Outer Galaxy
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. Ressler
The Extreme Outer Galaxy is a dense star-forming region that gets its name from its position 58,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. Earth, by comparison, is only 26,000 light-years from the center. Webb imaged a part of the Extreme Outer Galaxy known as the Digel Clouds, seen here with numerous young stars blasting out jets of material. These clouds are almost all hydrogen, with low levels of heavy elements. That makes the clouds similar to the Milky Way billions of years ago.
17. DART Observation
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
In October 2022, Webb turned its attention to a target of opportunity. That’s when NASA conducted the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), slamming a spacecraft into the smaller or two self-orbiting asteroids. Webb captured the moment of impact, as did the Hubble Telescope. Webb’s images show a tight point of light with ejecta expanding outward. The observations retained more data than Hubble’s.
18. Orion Nebula Carbon Detection
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
The Orion Nebula sits 1,300 light-years away, but it’s among the brightest nebulae in the night sky—you can even see it with the naked eye. Webb can see it much better, though. One of the young stars in Orion revealed a protoplanetary disk, and scientists found an interesting surprise in the star’s spectra. It is around this star where Webb detected evidence of methyl cation (CH3+), a vital carbon molecule that combines to form more complex organics.
19. Cartwheel Galaxy
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Early in Webb’s life, it took a peek at a commonly observed object known as The Cartwheel Galaxy. In the distant past, this galaxy survived a collision with another, leaving it with its distinctive wheel-like shape. Webb revealed the smoother arrangement of older stars in the core versus the young stars in the galaxy’s expanding ring.
20. GLASS-JWST Ancient Galaxies
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
We already talked about the Webb Deep Field, but some special things are hiding in that image that deserve attention. Two of the many galaxies visible in that frame caught the eye of researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. The galaxies (above) were found to have extreme redshifts of 10.5 and 12.5, meaning they appear as they did just 450 million and 350 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them among the most distant and, therefore, oldest galaxies ever seen.
21. Southern Ring Nebula
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
The Southern Ring is a planetary nebula, a cloud of dust and gas produced as an aging star swells and ejects mass. These dense nebulae can last for tens of thousands of years as stars reach the end of their lives, and the Southern Ring is an especially striking example with its multi-layered shape. Webb observed this object last year, revealing the source of the nebula for the first time. It’s the dimmer of the two stars in the right image above, which was captured with Webb’s MIRI instrument. The other image came from NIRCam with its shorter wavelength that cannot detect the second star. Hubble was unable to see the star through all that dust, either, but Webb picked it up with no problem.
22. Carina Nebula
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Among the first Webb images released by NASA was this striking vision of the Carina Nebula. The images show a star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. The empty area above the roiling clouds comes from the intense ultraviolet radiation from a cluster of hot young stars in the middle of the bubble.
23. The Sparkler
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Did you think we were done zooming into the Webb Deep Field? Well, think again. There’s another fascinating object hiding in there, which astronomers have dubbed The Sparkler. Like everything in the image, the Sparkler appears as it did in the distant past. The Sparkler is young and not very large, but it’s studded with globular clusters that have a lot in common with the clusters still present in the Milky Way. Scientists speculate that The Sparkler might look very much like the Milky Way did in its infancy.
24. Chameleon I Nebula
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Webb is often looking at swirling currents of newly formed stars, exploded solar systems, and other toasty places. But it’s also gazed into the depths of the Chamaeleon I nebula, which features the lowest temperatures in the known universe. While Chamaeleon I, about 500 light-years from Earth, is a star-forming region, part of the nebula is isolated from current formation activity. There, temperatures measured by Webb are an incredible -263 degrees Celsius (-441 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s a mere 10 degrees Celsius from absolute zero.
25. Enceladus Plume
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is of great interest to planetary scientists thanks to the prominent plumes of water that erupt from its surface. This clear evidence of a sub-surface ocean has made Enceladus a possible target of future robotic exploration. Webb imaged Enceladus recently, and while it can’t see details of the tiny moon itself, it was able to see the 6,000-mile plume of water leaking from its surface.
26. Titan Clouds and Surface
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Enceladus is too small to see clearly, but Webb has no trouble seeing the surface of Saturn’s largest moon. Titan is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere—a lot of nitrogen with traces of methane and hydrogen. There are also lakes of hydrocarbons on the surface, and Webb was able to spot some of them. The image above shows the moon with a few different filter options. The left image of the clouds used F212N (2.21 microns), and the right version with surface features is a combination of Blue=F140M (1.40 microns), Green=F150W (1.50 microns), Red=F200W (1.99 microns), and Brightness=F210M (2.09 microns).
27. NGC 604
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
In early 2024, NASA released a stunning NIRCam image of NGC 604, an enormous star-forming region outside our own galaxy. It’s more than 2.7 million light-years away in the galaxy Triangulum. The image looks like something that could be in our own celestial backyard, but it’s only visible in such great detail because of its size. NGC 604 is 1,300 light-years in diameter, 40 times larger than the Orion Nebula. The red and orange regions denote the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which play a key role in star formation. Webb’s sensitive infrared eyes can also see the cavernous spaces inside the nebula where the radiation from young stars pushes clouds away.
28. Fomalhaut Asteroid Belt
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Webb is so powerful, it’s seeing features of other solar systems for the first time. For example, the telescope recently detected an alien asteroid belt. It’s in the Fomalhaut system about 25 light-years away. That’s close in astronomical terms, and it is a rather beefy asteroid belt. Our main asteroid belt is about 1 AU thick (the distance between Earth and the sun), but Fomalhaut’s is a staggering 80 AU thick. Still, Webb is the first to see it. Other powerful observatories like ALMA and Hubble can only see the outline of the disk.
29. Tarantula Nebula
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Last year, Webb spotted a spider. Well, a nebula that NASA has characterized as a “cosmic tarantula.” The Tarantula Nebula is 161,000 light-years away in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. It apparently looks like a tarantula’s next lined with silk. The blue stars in the center have carved a bubble with their intense ultraviolet radiation and solar wind, but the wispy “silk” around the edges are dense pillars that can withstand the force from the star cluster.
30. Mirror Selfie
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
The James Webb Space Telescope can see all over the universe with its enormous mirror, but it can’t see itself. There are no external cameras, and instead of being in low-Earth orbit, it’s all the way out at L2, where no spacecraft is expected to venture. We may never see the whole telescope again, but we can see one part: the mirror. The team included a pinhole-style lens in the NIRCam that can see an image of the 6.5-meter primary mirror reflected via the secondary mirror. NASA used this to complete the mirror segment alignment during the commissioning process. Regardless, it’s a very neat selfie.
31. Little Red Dot Black Holes
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Dale Kocevski
The Webb telescope has spotted numerous objects known as little red dots (LRDs) in distant parts of the universe. Astronomers have been puzzling over these ancient star clusters since Webb came online, but an analysis culled from multiple surveys suggests LRDs may be a new population of black holes. We don’t yet know why these ancient black holes grew so rapidly, but their presence explains the high brightness of LRD, which previously had astronomers worried about flaws in our models of galaxy formation.
32. Sombrero Galaxy MIRI
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
The Sombrero Galaxy is one of the most iconic objects in the sky, and Webb allows us to see it in a new light. This image of the Sombrero Galaxy (also known as Messier 104) was captured with Webb’s MIRI instrument. In the mid-infrared, the core glows much less intensely, revealing distinct inner and outer disks. For the first time, astronomers can study the galaxy’s scant globular clusters and waves of carbon-containing molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
33. NGC 602 (Small Magellanic Cloud)
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
The unrivaled power of the Webb telescope allowed astronomers to identify the first brown dwarfs outside our galaxy, and this is where they are—NGC 602 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This satellite galaxy of the Milky Way is small and not very active, but it does have some star-forming regions like NGC 602. It was here that astronomers identified a population of brown dwarfs, a type of sub-stellar object sometimes called a failed star. They lack the mass to sustain a fusion reaction, making them very difficult to spot even in our galaxy.
34. HH 30 Protoplanetary Disc
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
The Taurus Molecular Cloud sits some 430 light-years away from Earth, and inside are many young stars like HH 30. HH 30, however, happens to be oriented so that is is seen edge-on from Earth—the star itself is obscured by the protoplanetary disc across the middle of the image. HH 30 is a rare type of Herbig-Haro object in which the outflowing of gas forms a narrow jet. The jet is surrounded by a wider, cone-shaped envelope of dust and gas. Below that, a wide nebular haze is illuminated by light from the star.
35. The Carbon-Rich Dust of Wolf-Rayet 140
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA
Webb has been keeping an eye on Wolf-Rayet 140 since the earliest days of its mission. Like all Wolf-Rayet stars, this one has high levels of heavy elements, and strong solar wind. WR 140 is actually a pair of stars, which orbit each other closely. The strong stellar winds collide, releasing waves of carbon-rich dust. The objects have released more than 17 “shells” of dust over a 130-year period. Here, Webb observations from 2022 and 2023 are compared to show how far the dust has traveled in 14 months.
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