This is an image made by combining visible light (from the Hubble and ESO orbiting telescopes) and invisible infrared and X-ray imagery (from the Webb, Chandra, and XMM-Newton telescopes).
The credit block is an education in itself:
Credit: X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO, XMM: ESA/XMM-Newton; IR: JWST: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI, Spitzer: NASA/JPL/CalTech; Optical: Hubble: NASA/ESA/STScI, ESO; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, N. Wolk, and K. Arcand, with additional support on NGC 346 by A. Kudrya
. That’s a lot of input for one picture – it even took five people to process the imagery.
It’s a dramatic picture, though, of something nobody here on Earth now is likely to ever see in person, at least not up close.
This is a formation of gas and dust known formally as M16, familiarly as the Eagle Nebula, and more specifically the portion of M16 called The Pillars of Creation. You can see it using binoculars from either the northern or southern hemisphere by looking at the tail of Serpens, the snake. In the northern hemisphere, between June and September, you’d look south. It’s just a little to the left of Scorpio. The Eagle Nebula is bright (because, in celestial terms, it’s hot) but from our perspective is part of the cloudiness along the edges of the great road of the night sky, the Milky Way. You can find lots of information on finding it (and, incidentally, how weird it is to have a constellation named for a snake) over at AstroBackyard.
“Processing” means deciding how to make the invisible radiation visible. In this case, X-rays were rendered in red, blue (the bright dots around the middle of the pillars are all new stars sending out lots of X-rays that Chandra picked up), while infrared was re-colored to red, green, and blue light.
You can see some of the layers and different perspectives the team were working with here at the Chandra X-ray Observatory page, although I found the image at the James Webb Space Telescope Flickr account.
Don’t skip that Chandra page; in addition to the layers of images that went into the picture there are “tactile plates” with 3-D printer files so you can replicate a frieze of The Pillars of Creation at home, or at least look at them like a topographical map.