Cats Paw Nebula NGC 6334, Scorpius Acrylic Award

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A breathtaking outer space picture showing an infrared view of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334) taken by VISTA. NGC 6334 is a vast region of star formation about 5500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius. The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across. NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of young massive stars in our galaxy, some nearly ten times the mass of our Sun and most born in the last few million years. The images were taken through Y, J and Ks filters (shown as blue, green and red respectively) and the exposure time was five minutes per filter. The field of view is about 0degrees, 43mins across. image code: ctspwneb ESO/J. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.