It’s the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, which is the nearest star-forming region in space to us, being just 400 light-years away. Both professional and amateur stargazers like to look at Rho Ophiuchi, which can be found just to one side of the plane of the Milky Way. What Webb shows us is only a tiny part of this dense region of gas and dust, which is what you’d expect, given the telescope’s astonishing resolution. The entire image is about half a light-year across, or 4.7tn km. The eye is immediately drawn to the white nebula at centre-left where a relatively young – a few million years old – star called S1 is lighting up everything around it. But look below at the red, bar-like feature that stretches across the entire image. This is an outflow of material from a protostar called VLA1623. Very young stars – their age measured in mere thousands of years – will pull hydrogen gas and dust on to themselves as they grow. But the dynamics involved mean some of this material will also get ejected outwards to crash into, and light up, the nearby environment.