Kashgar, China

Kashgar has a rich cultural history dating back thousands of years, having served as an important hub along the Silk Road. The rising of this remarkable landscape dates back even further.

A modern view of the remote oasis in China, located at the western end of the Tarim Basin and the Taklimakan Desert, is visible in this image acquired on July 23, 2014, by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The image is false-color infrared (bands 3, 2, 1) to better highlight the composition of Earth’s surface. Urban areas appear gray, including the famed city of Kashgar in the bottom-right corner. Networks of roads are interspersed with buildings, which appear as rectangles in various shades of blue and purple.

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James Webb Space Telescope

The image is divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes. The smallest of these are small, distant, and faint points of light. The largest of these appear larger, closer, brighter, and more fully resolved with 8-point diffraction spikes. The upper portion of the image is blueish, and has wispy translucent cloud-like streaks rising from the nebula below. The orangish cloudy formation in the bottom half varies in density and ranges from translucent to opaque. The stars vary in color, the majority of which have a blue or orange hue. The cloud-like structure of the nebula contains ridges, peaks, and valleys – an appearance very similar to a mountain range. Three long diffraction spikes from the top right edge of the image suggest the presence of a large star just out of view.

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