Day 14 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: a sky full of stars. The open cluster Westerlund 1 is located roughly 12,000 light-years away, residing behind a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust. Westerlund 1, seen in this James Webb Space Telescope image, is an impressive example of a super star cluster: It contains hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost 1 million suns and others 2,000 times larger than the sun (as large as the orbit of Saturn). If our solar system was located at the center of this remarkable cluster, our night sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full moon.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.
