The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile has captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of eleven public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes. Together these are providing a vast legacy of publicly available data for the global astronomical community.

Image: “VST images the Lagoon Nebula” by ESO/VPHAS+ team, licensed CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.

Credit and licence

Creator
ESO/VPHAS+ team
Licence
CC BY 4.0
Terms
Attribution required; changes must be indicated (resized and recompressed for the app). Commercial use and redistribution permitted.
Source
Wikimedia Commons
Credit line
“VST images the Lagoon Nebula” by ESO/VPHAS+ team (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons