New images from NASA’s next-generation James Webb Space Telescope present views of the cosmos so clear and crisp, it’s spooky. For Halloween, the space agency turned up the (mid infra-)red in a picture of the spectacular “Pillars of Creation” to give this remarkable star-forming region a darker, dustier tone.

The Pillars of Creation — located within the sprawling Eagle Nebula some 6,500 light-years away — first achieved astronomical fame when the Hubble Space Telescope observed it in 1995.

Then, it was brought back into the limelight as the ‘scope revisited it in 2014, and last week, Hubble’s successor Webb provided highly sharp, detailed views of the pillars, managing to peer through more of the area’s obscuring dust than was previously possible. That image was produced by the machine’s Near-Infrared instrument. However, as it turns out, Webb is also equipped to let the dust and gas themselves shine in their own ethereal way.

Switching to Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, provided the creepy observation of the iconic pillars we see above.

Viewing the scene in the mid-infrared brings out the dust that cloaks light from numerous stars shining through, sparkles more easily observed on other parts of the spectrum and highlighted in Webb’s seminal image of the landscape, according to NASA.

The effect lends the whole scene a more ghostly feel, like a great shadowy hand reaching across the universe. The crimson hues highlighted by MIRI are enough to make you wonder if we’re actually looking at the heavens or

Google quietly acquired Alter, a Twitter-backed AI avatar startup formerly named Facemoji, earlier this year for $100 million, TechCrunch reported Thursday. Alter’s acquisition was completed two months ago, an unidentified source told TechCrunch.

Google confirmed the acquisition late Thursday but didn’t provide details on the exact date of the acquisition and purchase price.

Alter’s chief operating officer, Jon Slimak, has updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect a new role at Google Avatars. As of publishing, Alter’s website remains down.

In recent years, Google has been investing heavily in its AI technology. from language learning models to image generators, the company is putting AI at the center of its suite of products. For example, with Search, Google is using AI not only to help people filter out bad results, but also to help those struggling with personal crises.

With its hardware, like the recently released Pixel 7Google is integrating AI processing cores into the phone’s processor to better help process photos or translate speech. While Google’s social media aspirations fizzled out in 2018it is finding updated momentum with YouTube Shorts, the company’s short-form video platform meant to compete with TikTok. It’s possible Google Avatars could integrate with Shorts sometime in the future.

Alter, headquartered in the US and Czech Republic, aims to generate avatars using AI, not only of people, but of the clothing and accessories they wear. For example, a person can buy an NFT of a designer bag and accessorize their avatar.

Jupiter’s jumbo-size moon Ganymede and icy moon Europa posed for the most detailed images ever taken of them from Earth. Planetary scientists from the University of Leicester used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to capture the images and study the moons’ surfaces.

You might be staring at these images and thinking “that looks kind of fuzzy,” and you’d be right. Compared with what NASA’s Juno spacecraft has seen by getting up close to those moons, the Earth-based images look unfocused. But that’s OK because this isn’t a beauty contest.

The researchers essentially conducted a cosmic fingerprint analysis.

“The new observations recorded the amount of sunlight reflected from Europa and Ganymede’s surfaces at different infrared wavelengths, producing a reflectance spectrum,” the university said in a statement on Monday. “These reflectance spectra are analyzed by developing a computer model that compares each observed spectrum to spectra of different substances that have been measured in laboratories.” This reveals the moons’ chemical processes by matching the reflectance data to known substances such as water and minerals.

The research team published a study on Europa in The Planetary Science Journal earlier this year and has had a study on Ganymede accepted for publication in the journal JGR: