This JWST’s near-infrared view of Herbig-Haro 211 reveals exquisite detail of the outflow of a young star. Herbig-Haro objects are formed when high speed stellar winds or jets of gas flowing from newborn stars produce shock waves as they collide with nearby gas and dust.
The bow shocks in this image are moving to the southeast (lower-left) and northwest (upper-right) powered by the narrow bipolar jets from the star. Molecules excited by the turbulent conditions, including hydrogen, carbon monoxide and silicon monoxide, glow in infrared light.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Tom Ray (Dublin)
This is NGC 3156, a lenticular galaxy with visible threads of dark reddish-brown dust across its disk. Lenticular galaxies have lens-like appearance when viewed from the side or edge-on. They share characteristics with both elliptical and spiral galaxies. Like spirals, lenticulars have a central bulge of stars and a large disk surrounding it. They often have dark dust lanes like spirals, but no large-scale spiral arms. Like ellipticals, lenticular galaxies have mostly older stars and little ongoing star formation.
73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann (aka Schwassmann–Wachmann 3 or SW3) is a periodic comet that has a 5.4 year orbital period and that has been actively disintegrating since 1995. It initially broke into four large pieces labeled 73P-A, B, C and D. As of March 2006, at least eight fragments were known: B, C, G, H, J, L, M and N. This animated gif of Fragment B was put together from Hubble images taken over a period of 3 days in April, 2016.
JWST’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured this detailed image of SN 1987A, the remnant of supernova 1987A). The material ejected from the supernova in the center of the remnant forms a keyhole shape. The faint crescents just outside the center were newly discovered by JWST.
JWST has turned its IR vision on Neptune. The eight planet’s dark and ghostly appearance is caused by atmospheric methane absorbing infrared light. High clouds above most of Neptune’s absorbing methane easily stand out in this image. Because its surface is coated with frozen nitrogen, Neptune’s largest moon Triton (in the upper left) is brighter in than Neptune in reflected IR sunlight. It’s surrounded by JWST’s characteristic diffraction spikes.
NGC 2022 is the brightest planetary nebula in the constellation Orion. In early telescopes (and in today’s medium-sized amateur telescopes) such nebulae look like small grayish patches of light. Since they don’t look like stars, but a bit like the gas giant planets, early astronomers tagged them as “planetary nebula,” and the name has stuck.
This ribbon-like cloud is a small section of an expanding supernova remnant created by a shock wave that heats and ionizes surrounding ambient gas. The supernova is cataloged as SN1066. Light from that supernova reached Earth in 1066 AD, and the “guest star” was visible for a couple of years, at times brighter than Venus. The remnant is still expanding and is over 60 light-years across.
NGC 6684 is a lenticular galaxy, disk-shaped but without the spiral arms of galaxies like the Andromeda Galaxy or our Milky Way. Thus, lenticular galaxies are somewhere between elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies, often with a diffuse, ghostly look. NGC 6684 also lacks the dark dust lanes that thread through other galaxies, adding to its hazy appearance.
NGC 1512 is a barred spiral galaxy with an unusual double ring structure, one ring around the galactic nucleus and another further out in the main disk. It’s about 38 million light-years away in the constellation Horologium. It’s on a collision course to merge with its smaller neighbor NGC 1510 (on the far right in the picture).
NGC 6652 is a globular cluster about 30,000 light-years from Earth and roughly 6,500 light-years from the galactic center.
The Euclid Space Telescope is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope is intended to map the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing galaxies out to 10 billion light-years across more than a third of the sky. Euclid’s instruments have captured their first test images. The images above are from its visible light instrument. The VIS instrument will take super sharp images of billions of galaxies to measure their shapes. Though this test image is full of detail, the area of sky that it covers is actually only about a quarter of the width and height of the full Moon.
A pair of young stars lie at the center of the prominent reddish diffraction spikes in this NIRcam image from JWST. Energetic jets of gas from HH (Herbig-Haro) 46/47 extend for over a light-year though a dark nebula that hides the stars when viewed with visible light. JWST’s infrared vision allows a deeper view.
This image of the Dimorphos was taken by Hubble about four months after the asteroid was hit by the DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). Hubble’s sensitivity reveals dozens of boulders knocked loose by the impact. They are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed in the Solar System. Hubble’s photometry suggests the boulders range from 3 to 22 feet across. They are drifting away from the asteroid at a roughly a half-mile per hour.
NASA released the image of Rho Ophiuchi, the closest star formation region to Earth, as the First Anniversary image for JWST. You can read about it 
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 took this picture of UGC 11860, a galaxy which lies around 184 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The galaxy recently played host to an almost unimaginably energetic stellar explosion. A supernova explosion was detected in UGC 11860 in 2014 by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, previously called the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer. My first project with NASA was the design of the power regulators for the x-ray sensors in the 
The hazy area in the center of this image is the highly irregular galaxy is ESO 174-1. It’s about 11 million light-years away and consists of a bright cloud of stars and a faint, meandering tendril of dark gas and dust.
On 25 June, the James Webb Space Telescope took its first near-infrared observations of Saturn. Saturn is extremely dark in the infrared light the NIRCam instrument because methane absorbs almost all of the sunlight falling on the atmosphere, but the icy rings are reflective and relatively bright.