Processing JWST data that NASA hasn't: NGC 628

[pipnina]

I figured that since I realised you can download Hubble and JWST data straight from the MAST website, I may as well poke around and see what is on there. There are thousands of files (although many are part of the same small set of observations) and I muddled around until I landed on a gold mine. This is NGC 628 captured by JWST and processed by me in Pixinsight and Rawtherapee:

This is all MIRI data. Where blue is represented by the 7.7 micron wide band filter, green by the 10 micron wide band, and red by the 21 micron wide band. The molecular clouds are truly remarkable, and the red dots in the 21 micron band make it look like hydrogen regions in our visual light photos!

 

I then downloaded NIRCAM data, and blended it with the MIRI data to produce a very different image, almost reminiscent of our HOO pallet images.

This proved extremely hard to align the 3 colour channels. While pixinsight could register blue and green to eachother, there were no stars besides 3/4 very bright ones in the red channel. I did my best to align them all in gimp first but, as you can see my red channel is still a little off. It didn't help that all the images started off at different resolutions and scales.

This uses the 2.0 micron filter, 3.6 micron filter, and 7.7 micron filter images of the target.

Nevertheless I think it looks beautiful, and combining the sharp shorter wavelengths in blue and green with the glowing scarlet clouds in red makes a very striking image. I think I will be doing this for more targets as it's quite fun to fiddle around with!