NASA / ESA / CSA / J. Schmidt

Data from Proposal 5804, PI Tom Megeath

Infrared view from JWST situated just north of the bright Orion Nebula, but under M43. Instead of viewing the visibly bright part of the Orion molecular cloud complex, this is looking into a rather dusty cloud with lots of jets propelled by forming protostars visible. Darker areas are clouds of dense dust thick enough that even NIRCam didn't detect any emission from them. It is possible to see a lot of background galaxies, so we're probably seeing much of what there is to see. No doubt MIRI could see some of the jets that are occluded by the dust, though.

Processing notes: I have big issues with the mosaics output by the JWST pipeline, as usual. I opted not to manually mosaic it because it's just too time-consuming. At least this time most of the problems are on the left third of the image. Some minor misalignment during the automated mosaicing process caused weird patches around some of the bright sources to erroneously be removed as if they were transient events like cosmic rays. Also, when you see the filter "F444W-470N" I do believe that means both filters are overlapped, and therefore only what makes it through the narrower filter hits the detector. So "Red" here is really just a narrowband filter. Easy to get confused.

Pale Yellow (Almost white): NIRCam/F360M
Red: NIRCam/F444W-F470N
Orange: NIRCam/F480M
Cyan: NIRCam/F210M

North is about 77° clockwise from up.

Tags:   JWST star formation dust nebula stars Herbig-Haro stellar jets nursery protostars Messier 43 Messier 42 Orion infrared HOPS 383 Megeath

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