Bright sources off the edge of the JWST NIRCam field of view scatter light onto the NIRCam detectors creating image artifacts. The first of these to be identified was named dragon's breath. It is caused by stars ~2" from the field of view. Since then, other NIRCam scattered light artifacts have been identified, including a stronger NIRCam Dragon's Breath Type II due to bright objects further away (~12").

Dragon's breath (type I) is caused by light scattering from the inner wall of the mask immediately in front of the focal plane array. Its effects can be minimized by ensuring that bright objects are not located just outside the field of view.

In the long wavelength (LW) channel, the integrated intensity of the scattered light is up to ~1.5% of the total intensity from an equivalent in-field source, with the peak pixel including up to ~0.75% of the source intensity. The total intensity of the scattered light depends on the distance of the source from the edge of the detector, with the strongest effect occurring when the source is ~1.9" from the detector edge in the LW channel. The light scatters about 200–250 pixels into the field, with the peak intensity occurring within ~50 pixels (1 LW pixel = 0.063″).

The effect is significantly smaller in the short wavelength (SW) channel, where the integrated intensity of the scattered light is less than ~0.4% of the total intensity of the equivalent in-field source, with the peak pixel including ~0.01%.

Avoidance zones  

The dragon's breath avoidance zones are regions around the perimeters of all 10 NIRCam detectors. In the LW channel, dragon's breath is strongest for sources positioned ~1.9″ from the detector edge and for those within ±0.8″ from that position, forming an avoidance annular region around each detector. In the SW channel, the avoidance zone is centered at ~2.1″ from the detector edge and has a width of ±0.5″, including the region between SW detectors in each module.