One galaxy, two space telescopes, and two very different pictures of what is happening 32 million light-years away.
Wynyard Planetarium is currently featuring a side-by-side view of NGC 628, also known as Messier 74 or the Phantom Galaxy, comparing observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope with those from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The galaxy sits in the constellation Pisces and faces us almost head-on, making its spiral structure unusually easy to . Hubble's visible-light view picks out young blue stars, pink star-forming regions and dark lanes where dust blocks some of the starlight.
Webb looks at the same galaxy in infrared wavelengths. That changes the picture dramatically: warm dust in the spiral arms becomes much more prominent, revealing a web of gas and dust connected with the cycle of star formation.
NASA says NGC 628 is part of the PHANGS programme, which combines observations from several telescopes to study how stars form inside dusty gas clouds and how the energy from young stars reshapes the material around them.
The comparison is a neat example of why astronomers use different instruments rather than searching for one definitive photograph of space. Each telescope is sensitive to different wavelengths of light, so each exposes a different layer of the same object.
The image can be seen on the Wynyard Planetarium website, with further scientific detail available from NASA's NGC 628 comparison.