ESO's new Cat's Paw Nebula image shows glowing details

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a spectacular new image of the Cat's Paw Nebula, a glimmering region of dust and gas near the center of the Milky Way.

The ESO's latest image of the Cat's Paw Nebula, officially known as NGC 6334, shows how well this cloudy, dusty hotbed of star birth lives up to its name. Discovered in 1837 by British astronomer John Herschel, who could make out only a small part of it from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, NGC 6334 now easily brings to mind an improbable, 50 light-years wide cosmic cat paw-print. The Cat's Paw Nebula is 5500 light-years away and takes up a little more sky space than a full Moon. It can be found near the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion). Astronomers estimate that the Cat’s Paw Nebula could contain several tens of thousands of stars in all, but most of them are well hidden by cosmic dust and difficult to study. The nebula continues to be extensively observed, because it is one of the most active nurseries of bright, big and hot blue stars known in our galaxy. Many of these stellar newborns are barely a few million years old. Most emerge with around ten times our sun's mass. This portrait, the Cat's Paw Nebula appears red, because material between the nebula and Earth scatter and absorb most of its blue and green light. The red light comes primarily from ionized hydrogen gas shining in the radiant glow emitted by the nebula's hot, youthful stars. To create the new picture of NCG 6334, the ESO team combined images produced by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Images were taken through red, green and blue filters, as well as through a special filter capable of detecting the light from glowing hydrogen.

ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

Around the Cat's Paw Nebula, a wide, centered view of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334)

image:62117:3::0