ESO and Amateur Astronomer Capture Sharpest Image of Prawn Nebula Ever

The European Space Observatory's VLT Survey Telescope has captured the sharpest image ever obtained of the Prawn Nebula, a huge mass of gas and cosmic dust about 6,000 light years away from Earth.

The image shows the Prawn Nebula (formally known as IC 4628) as clusters of hot, newborn stars nestled among the clouds that make up the nebula in the constellation Scoprius. The hot stars appear as blue light in the visible spectrum, but the nebula also releases intense radiation which is most visible in the ultraviolet light spectrum.

At 250 light years across, the Prawn Nebula is so large that if you were looking at it in the night sky, it would take up as much space as four full Moons. Although the nebula is massive, it is often overlooked by astronomers because it appears so faint when observed in the visible light spectrum.

The nebula's gas glows because of of ultraviolet light generated by the starts within it. The light, emitted as radiation, strips electrons from hydrogen atoms, which then later recombine and release energy in the form of light.

Over the last few million years this region of sky where the Prawn Nebula is located has generated many stars, both individually and in clusters, the ESO said in a statement.

The space agency spoke in high regards of the image, which it said was enhanced by images by Martin Pugh, a "very skilled amateur astronomer observing from Australia" who observed the nebula with 32-centimeter and 13-centimeter telescopes.

"This image was taken by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. The VST is the largest telescope in the world designed for surveying the sky in visible light. It is a state-of-the-art 2.6-meter telescope built around the OmegaCAM camera that contains 32 CCD detectors that together create 268-megapixel images. This new 24 000-pixel-broad image is a mosaic of two such images and is one of the largest single images released by ESO so far," the ESO said in a statement.

The ESO said the Prawn Nebula image "forms part of a detailed public survey of a large part of the Milky Way called VPHAS+ that is using the power of the VST to search for new objects such as young stars and planetary nebulae."

The agency said the survey will provide the "best images yet taken" of many huge glowing star formation regions.