Splashes of colour illustrate the clear difference between the two most populous type of bright nebulae in our Milky Way Galaxy, emission and reflection nebulae.
In this image, JWST strips away the gas that is transparent at infrared wavelengths, and reveals a skeleton of dusty ribbons that are part of the material that is flowing onto the young stars as they grow.
There’s an almost 3D quality to this image of a portion of the Milky Way, with the illusion that the nebulae are far more distant when in fact they are much closer than the dark dust lanes that meander through the Milky Way.