&philcUK

gallery

The third image of ESO’s GigaGalaxy Zoom project provides a 370-million-pixel breathtaking vista of the Lagoon Nebula.

The intriguing object depicted here — the Lagoon Nebula — is located four to five thousand light-years away towards the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer). The nebula is a giant interstellar cloud, 100 light-years across, where stars are forming. The scattered dark patches seen all over the nebula are huge clouds of gas and dust that are collapsing under their own weight and which will soon give birth to clusters of young, glowing stars.

The name of the Lagoon Nebula derives from the wide lagoon-shaped dark lane located in the middle of the nebula that divides it into two glowing sections. The image was taken with the 67-million-pixel Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile and covers more than one and a half square degree - an area eight times larger than that of the Full Moon - with a total of about 370 million pixels.

Image Credit: ESO