Yuval Harpaz 𝚿👨‍🎓 📊🌌🔭
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yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Yuval Harpaz 𝚿👨‍🎓 📊🌌🔭
@yuvharpaz.bsky.social
1.9K followers 130 following 810 posts
PhD in psychology, brain research, Liberal. Data visualization, python, nature.
#JWST news dashboard: https://yuval-harpaz.github.io/astro/jwst_latest_release.html
🤖: @astrobotjwst.bsky.social
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yuvharpaz.bsky.social
NGC 4666 by #JWST 🔭, MIRI.
NASA, ESA , CSA, STSCiI
Infrared image of the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 4666, showing a bright, elongated central disk filled with clusters of white and pale blue star-forming regions. Darker dust lanes weave through the galaxy’s mid-plane, while warm reddish and cool bluish tones blend toward the outer halo. The galaxy sits against a dark background speckled with faint stars and distant galaxies
November 19, 2025 at 9:12 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Galactic mess
Intertwined galaxies in an undefinable form
November 7, 2025 at 10:53 AM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Some context.
target name: M0416
NASA | ESA | CSA | STScI
Infrared image of the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1–2403, showing a dense cosmic field of elliptical and spiral galaxies scattered across a gradient of warm orange and cool blue tones. The orange areas highlight dusty, older galaxies, while the bluish hues trace cooler gas and younger structures. Gravitational lensing subtly distorts some galaxies into stretched arcs around the cluster’s core. A bright, spiked star shines near the lower right, contrasting against the distant, softly glowing galaxies that fill the background.
November 4, 2025 at 7:00 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
A galaxy, maybe foreground for cluster MACS J0416.1–2403, by #JWST🔭, MIRI.
A poor resolution image, mostly gray, of a spiral arm galaxy. The arms form a ring around the bright nucleus.
November 4, 2025 at 7:00 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
#JWST 🔭 NIRCam data for NGC-2440
A planetary nebula, a dying star shedding material
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
chatGPT: Infrared image of the planetary nebula NGC 2440, showing a brilliant, chaotic structure surrounding a dying star at its center. Twin lobes of gas and dust expand outward in a butterfly-like shape, glowing in shades of red, green, and violet. The star’s intense light radiates through the nebula’s translucent filaments, revealing layered shells of ejected material. Surrounding the nebula, a dense field of golden and white stars fills the background, scattered across the dark expanse of space.
November 3, 2025 at 8:26 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
so I fiddled with the procedure to save chunks on the go. this is all in my repo if anyone finds it useful,
see download_fits_files function here:
github.com/yuval-harpaz...
python code
November 3, 2025 at 7:22 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
technical: #JWST 🔭 data comes in .fits files with 10 objects, where only the first (header) and second (data) are useful for me. While it is easy to download the header with fitsheader, it is tricky to download the data itself.
I use astropy with use_fsspec to do that but sometimes it fills RAM, >
python code
November 3, 2025 at 7:22 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
V* V2455 Ori outflows in rings. Take this in different IR hues that #JWST 🔭 gives us, and you get a candidate for the most beautiful corners of our galaxy.
chatGPT: A vivid infrared view of the star-forming region HOPS-108. At the center, a brilliant yellow-white newborn star shines with intense diffraction spikes, surrounded by glowing clouds of gas and dust. Wisps of purple, blue, and orange flow outward in curved arcs, tracing powerful jets of material ejected from the young star. The surrounding nebula glows in iridescent layers, with cooler blue regions blending into warmer gold and magenta tones. Numerous smaller stars sparkle across the frame against a deep, cosmic blue background.
November 3, 2025 at 8:10 AM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Will you please consider checking if the rings moved from visit to visit? Here are previous fits names of the object
github.com/yuval-harpaz...
outflow in rings shape
October 31, 2025 at 11:42 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
I was just looking into this 🔭, SNR so so.
Some interesting patterns
Two spiky stars with smeers of pink outflow across the frame A dark region in frame center, embedded with a red glow from a young object, I think. pink globes of dust from left to right at the bottom of the image
October 23, 2025 at 3:48 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
I love those mirrored galaxies
A stretched pink galaxy with left-right symmetrical patterns
September 29, 2025 at 4:25 AM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Antares, right on top of the setting moon
A crescent moon and a small dot right above, gray white background
September 27, 2025 at 5:05 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
There are many holes, and my code failed to fill them using nearest neighbor approach. I added a pic of the data itself (+ an older pic) and marked with an arrow where the disc of our supermassive black hole is. We cannot see it with an infrared 🔭, all the stuff around it is too bright.
top left shows the quoted image zoomed in on a bright star cluster at the core of our galaxy. The background shows a sharper but full-of-holes image, with red blue and green emerging through unfilled holes. a black arrow points at the black hole's location at the edge of a green "stain" of saturated pixels
September 19, 2025 at 4:38 AM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Pismis 24 at the core of the Lobster Nebula, by JWST 🔭
chatGPT: A star-forming region dominated by a towering, mountain-like cloud of gas and dust rising from the bottom of the frame. The cloud glows faintly in blue-gray hues, sculpted into ridges and peaks by stellar winds. Above the peak, a golden-orange cloud is illuminated, contrasting with the dark starry background. Countless stars, some with sharp diffraction spikes, are scattered across the black sky, framing the dramatic nebular structure.
September 12, 2025 at 8:41 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
The lower half has some serious issues, but this is the data, I am not going to cut and paste manually
red dots don't match the green and blue light
September 8, 2025 at 6:42 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
My take on Serpens G3-G6 star-forming region, #JWST 🔭 data. Noise was cleaned so so, some artifacts are clearly visible.
chatGPT: A star-forming region in Serpens, filled with hundreds of bright stars scattered across the blackness of space. At the center and stretching to the right, glowing red and orange jets of gas pierce through dark dust clouds, marking sites of young stars in formation. Foreground stars shine with sharp diffraction spikes, while the background reveals a dense field of fainter stars
September 8, 2025 at 6:38 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
JWST 🔭 captured a few regions close to the core of the galaxy (ours). Dense.
Target name is MIRI-GC-BCKGR-1. The other region (GAL-CENTER-Tile-3) is denser, too many dead pixels.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.
chatGPT: Infrared image of a region near the Milky Way’s galactic center, captured by JWST’s MIRI. The field is filled with countless blue-white stars scattered across a dark, dusty background. Patches of glowing red clouds trace interstellar gas and dust, with several bright stars showing prominent diffraction spikes. The view highlights complex structures in the dense galactic core.
August 20, 2025 at 2:43 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
NGC 6537, or the Red Spider Nebula, by #JWST 🔭, NIRCam.
chatGPT: Infrared image of NGC 6537, the Red Spider Nebula, taken by JWST’s NIRCam. A bright white core glows at the center, surrounded by a faint reddish halo. Wispy green and purple filaments stream outward in opposite directions, cutting through a dense starfield. The overall view highlights turbulent gas and dust structures shaped by powerful stellar winds
August 18, 2025 at 5:31 AM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
MRG-P0918 by #JWST 🔭, NIRCam. The target is a galaxy that appears distorted from gravitational lensing. I marked it with a pink ellipse, but see all the other distorted light here and there.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
See alt text for the other image. Here I marked distortions using green ellipses, and a pink one for the target. chatGPT: A deep-field view of space filled with countless galaxies of varying shapes and colors, from faint red arcs distorted by gravitational lensing to bright white elliptical forms. Foreground stars display sharp diffraction spikes, while more distant galaxies cluster densely across the dark background, revealing the immense depth and structure of the cosmos
August 16, 2025 at 7:56 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Yes, WL 16. A protostar nevertheless, thanks for the heads up
A crude image of the object ranging in color from blue to yellow, with cyan text inserted to label objects, including WL 16
August 10, 2025 at 9:49 AM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
OPH E-MM3 by JWST 🔭. There should be a protostar in there.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.
A bright region on the right side is surrounded by a cloud of smooth gray with some brighter and darker lines. A complex and beautiful feature.
August 8, 2025 at 11:23 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
#JWST 🔭 new data for NGC-5861.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.
chatGPT: A stunning near-infrared view of the spiral galaxy NGC 5861, captured by JWST’s NIRCam. The galaxy dominates the field, tilted slightly, revealing its grand spiral arms stretching outward from a bright, concentrated core. The core is a brilliant white, surrounded by swirling lanes of stars and dark dust, forming a dense central bar. Subtle red knots—sites of star formation—are scattered along the arms, more prominent in the lower right where a bright blue-white star-forming region glows intensely. The galaxy is surrounded by a rich background of distant red and white galaxies. Cross-shaped dark artifacts mark the boundaries between the NIRCam detector segments. In the bottom-left, a color key shows filters at 0.90 μm (blue), 1.50 μm (green), and 2.77 μm (red), corresponding to the composite image’s hues. The fine structure of the galactic disk and faint halo is captured in exquisite detail.
July 30, 2025 at 12:31 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
The bright double star is 2MASS J18573793+5331140, the target is a fainter star 2/3rds of the way to the galaxy cluster.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI #JWST 🔭
chatGPT: A richly detailed infrared image from JWST’s MIRI instrument, showing a vibrant cosmic landscape filled with galaxies of various shapes, colors, and distances. At the lower right, a brilliant double star radiates sharp blue-white diffraction spikes, dominating the foreground
July 29, 2025 at 5:47 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Many pixels at the heart of the system are dead. Above, I filled them using the nearest neighbor approach
A black circle with some patches of light covers the center of the previous image
July 24, 2025 at 4:17 PM
yuvharpaz.bsky.social
Here is my version of Apep (target_name AX-J1600.9-5142).
#JWST🔭, MIRI.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.
The data was just released to the public.
chatGPT: A spectacular infrared image of the star system AX J1600.9−5142, also known as Apep, captured by JWST's MIRI instrument. Dominating the center is a brilliant, white, overexposed star system radiating faint diffraction spikes. Surrounding it is a luminous, coiled spiral structure made of warm orange and reddish dust, wrapping outward like a corkscrew. These dusty arms suggest strong, high-speed stellar winds—likely from a Wolf-Rayet star in a binary system—interacting with a slower stellar wind, producing the striking spiral. Cooler, diffuse blue clouds fill the background, while faint stars are scattered across the dark field. A blue-green-red color key at bottom-left shows the image channels: 770 nm (blue), 1500 nm (green), and 2550 nm (red).
July 24, 2025 at 4:12 PM