• NASA released the James Webb Space Telescope's new image of the Pillars of Creation on Wednesday.
• The famous stellar nursery is within the vast Eagle Nebula 6,500 light-years away.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope released a snapshot on Wednesday of the Pillars of Creation, towering columns of gas and dust where stars are born. The epic stellar nursery is within the vast Eagle Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas which lies 6,500 light-years away.

The Hubble Space Telescope also shot the famous nursery in 1995. When comparing the two images next to one another, Webb's camera pierces through solid columns of cosmic dust, revealing hundreds of stars that Hubble couldn't see.

Below, Webb's fresh snapshot in all its uncropped glory, showing light-years-long tendrils of gas. There is no galaxy within the view, according to NASA. Webb's Near Infrared Camera captured the image using special infrared filters. It was then artificially colored to make specific features stand out.

Webb cuts through dust, capturing a stellar nursery overflowing with stars

In 1995, Hubble Space Telescope captured an iconic cosmic portrait of the Pillars of Creation. Both Webb and Hubble are space-based telescopes, but they differ in many ways. Hubble sees ultraviolet light, visible light, and a small slice of infrared, while Webb primarily looks at the universe in infrared.

Webb — which is 100 times more powerful than Hubble — can peer at objects whose light was emitted more than 13.5 billion years ago, which Hubble can't see. This is because this light has been shifted into the infrared wavelengths that Webb is specifically designed to detect.

Below on the left is Hubble's visible-light view, which shows brown and dark pillars. Webb's near-infrared image, on the right, penetrates through dense clouds of dust and gas and shows the same pillars as luminous red sites of new star births.

The small red dots on the edges of the columns are young stars, which are only a few hundred thousand years old, according to the Webb team.

Webb's image is overflowing with stars. The telescope will help researchers more precisely count newborn stars and quantities of gas and dust, according to NASA. More accurate star counts will help build a clearer understanding of how stars form and burst out of dusty clouds over millions of years.

The infrared telescope is stationed in a gravitationally stable orbit, nearly 1 million miles from Earth, but can see light from the first stars and the earliest galaxies.