 Here's a collage of James Webb's first release images. For a deeper look, see the James Webb first release video. Here's a Spitzer infrared space telescope image of some stars in the large Magellanic Cloud Dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Now we're morphing this into the image taken by Webb's mid-infrared instrument. As you can see, Webb, with its significantly larger primary mirror and improved detectors, allows us to see the infrared sky with significantly improved clarity, enabling even more discoveries. Here we are zooming into the southern ring planetary nebula, 2,000 light years away. The southern ring has a binary star system at its center. One is a white dwarf. The brighter star in both images has not yet run out of fuel. It closely orbits the dimmer white dwarf, impacting the distribution of the ejected material. Pairing Webb's infrared images with existing data from the European Space Agency's Gaia Observatory, researchers were able to precisely pinpoint the mass of the central star before it created the nebula. Their calculations show the central star was nearly three times the mass of the sun before it ejected its layers of gas and dust. After those ejections, it measured only 60% of the mass of the sun. This is not only a crisp image of a planetary nebula, it also shows us objects in the vast distance of space behind it. Note the bright angled line at the upper left. It's a far away galaxy seen edge on. Here's Hubble's view of NGC 3324 called the Cosmic Cliffs, located at the northwest corner of the Corine Nebula. As we transition this to the Webb near infrared image, we begin to see hundreds of previously hidden stars. These insets highlight three regions of the cosmic cliffs with particularly active molecular hydrogen outflows. Molecular hydrogen is a vital ingredient for making new stars and an excellent tracer for the early stages of their formation. As young stars gather material from the gas and dust that surround them, most also eject a fraction of that material back out again from their polar regions in jets and outflows. What we're seeing here is the molecular hydrogen getting swept up and excited by these jets. This image from Hubble, released in May 2022, shows the barred spiral galaxy NGC 7496, which lies over 24 million light years away. As we transition to the Webb view, we can see that it still picks up the glowing gas, but also shows much more detail. Here we are zooming into a Hubble image of Stefan's quintet. Here's the Webb image. At the center of NGC 7319, there is a supermassive black hole around which the galaxy is rotating. This one is active, meaning significant quantities of material are falling into it. The spectrum, from the black hole's outflow, shows a region filled with hot ionized gases including iron, argon, neon, sulfur, and oxygen, as denoted by the pixels at given wavelengths. Here's a Hubble view of the Cartwheel galaxy, a ring galaxy around 500 million light years away. Here's Webb's combined image from both the near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras. The galaxy has two rings, a bright inner ring, and a surrounding colorful outer ring. These two rings have been expanding outwards from the center of the collision for around 440 million years. Here's a look at the galaxy from just the mid-infrared camera.