A mere 390 light-years away, Sun-like stars and future planetary systems are forming in the Rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to our fair planet. The James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam peered into the nearby natal chaos to capture this infrared image at an inspiring scale.
This looks very cool but I’m wondering what kind of postprocessing they apply to the images. There’s no way the original infrared image looks like this.
I’m not sure about these infrared images, but if you’re interested, you can actually download the raw data from Webb and use it to practice postprocessing. There’s probably writeups on the process online somewhere though, if you’re interested