NGC 1637 (Hubble WFC3 and Webb NIRCam images, annotated)

Image of galaxy NGC 1637 captured by Hubble’s WFC3 and Webb’s NIRCam, with compass arrows, scale bar, and colour key for reference.

The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).

The scale bar is labeled in light-years, which is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year. (It takes 3,500 years for light to travel a distance equal to the length of the bar.) One light-year is equal to about 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers.

This image shows visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colours. The colour key shows which WFC3 and NIRCam filters were used when collecting the light. The colour of each filter name is the visible light colour used to represent the light that passes through that filter.

[Image description:The image of SN2025pht/NGC 1637 shows a face-on spiral galaxy speckled with myriad blue and red stars. The yellowish core of the galaxy forms a fuzzy oval tilted to the upper right. At the bottom right are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. The north arrow points in the 10 o’clock direction. The east arrow points toward 7 o’clock. At the lower left is a scale bar labeled 19 arcseconds and 3500 light-years. The length of the scale bar is about one-seventh the total width of the image. Below the image is a colour key showing which filters were used to create the image and which visible-light colour is assigned to each filter. From left to right, Hubble WFC3 filters are: F438W is blue, F555W is blue, and F814W is green; Webb NIRCam filters are: F150W is green, F277W is red, and F444W is red.]