The stunning appearance of the Carina Nebula in the earliest released images from the James Webb Space Telescope owes a lot to Alyssa Pagan. As a science visuals developer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, she is one of the processors who translate the data captured by Webb into something not only visible but beautiful.
Pagan calls the work a “collaboration” between data, aesthetic principles built up over decades of scientific study, and subjective taste. That collaboration is…
