Cosmic Cliffs 2024 $30.45 Stamps — Priority Mail Express Rate (Not a Forever Stamp)

Please note: this is a $30.45 denominated Priority Mail Express® stamp, not a Forever Stamp.

What you are looking at

The Cosmic Cliffs sit inside the Carina Nebula, 7,600 light-years out. Webb's infrared cameras see through the cloud of matter that blocks visible light — the way fog lights cut through mist — picking up heat and radiation beyond the visible spectrum and exposing stars and galaxies that were hidden behind it.

Reading the colors

Red and yellow flares scattered across the cliffs mark stars still forming and stars newly born. The orange and brown banks across the lower third are swirls of gas and dust. In the blue and black above and beyond the nebula are further stars, some in the Milky Way and some in far-off galaxies.

The whole structure is in motion: radiation and stellar wind from the new stars drive gas and dust into cycles of creation and destruction, and those particles are the raw material of the next generation of stars and planets.

The telescope

Launched December 25, 2021, Webb is the largest and most sensitive telescope ever put into space, built to return high-definition imagery and new data. It has already changed what is known about cosmic origins and opened regions of the universe that had not been examined.

Credits and format

Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamp from an image supplied by NASA, ESA, the Canadian Space Agency and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Issued in a pane of four.

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