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After reading this NASA article on Tarantula's Nebula of this image:

enter image description here

What is the really bright orange star in the center or upper-left of the young blue stars? The second link further provides information but not enough:

To the upper left of the cluster of young stars, and the top of the nebula’s cavity, an older star prominently displays NIRCam’s distinctive eight diffraction spikes, an artifact of the telescope’s structure.

James K
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DialFrost
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1 Answers1

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The best match in SIMBAD appears to be the red supergiant W61 7-8. Though it stands out in this near infrared image, in visible light you would need a 30cm or larger telescope to see it (V=13.6).

The parallax of 0.02±0.02 mas should be taken with a grain of salt. Gaia DR3 estimates the distance to this star as 16 kpc, about 1/3 as far away as the nebula.

On the right of the SIMBAD page, if you select the '2MASS' radio button, the Aladin Lite image resembles a lower-resolution subset of the JWST image rotated clockwise a little.

2MASS/Aladin Lite image of region in question

Mike G
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    Should be noted that it's foreground star. It's in our Galaxy, not in Large Magellanic Cloud where Tarantula nebula lays. It can be confirmed by the star's parallax ~0.02 mas what gives us the distance about 50 parsecs. – Heopps Sep 26 '22 at 12:41
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    @Heopps Are you sure? Parallax more like 20 mas for 50 pc distance. – Mike G Sep 26 '22 at 15:45
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    @Heopps a parallax of $0.02\pm0.02$ mas is consistent with being at any distance further than about 25000 pc and certainly consistent with being part of the Magellanic clouds. – ProfRob Sep 26 '22 at 20:19
  • @ProfRob - ok, looks like I was wrong. But it should be photometrically estimated parallax, not geometrical parallax like GAIA? – Heopps Sep 27 '22 at 05:05
  • It is a red supergiant star - so it's spectroscopic parallax would also place it at a large distance consistent with the LMC. – ProfRob Sep 27 '22 at 05:56