A lot of times, the names objects have been given require you to look at objects through lower power scopes that are similar to those being used when the objects were being named. The Owl Nebula looks like an adorable little owl until you zoom in, and it is clearly just a planetary nebula. 

Through a 16” telescope, the Tarantula Nebula looks disturbing like there is a spider looking back at you through the eyepiece, and on first seeing it, I had to just remind myself “it’s just hot gas and baby stars.” 

Somewhere between the “awww, it’s an owl” and the “ack, that’s very spidery” is the Chamaeleon Cloud. Recently highlighted images from the Hubble Space telescope don’t look as much like a chameleon as the low-res images, but again, if you squint, you can see where the eye is at least. This particular nebula is reflecting toward us the blue light of young stars. 

The larger of these stars can be seen illuminating butterfly-shaped glows of gas. One of these is objects, called a Herbig-Haro object, shines at the bottom of this image, which you can download from our website, DailySpace.org.

This image was initially taken so researchers can search for brown dwarf stars. While not identified in this image, the Hubble release says that six of these failed stars, which are 10-90 times the mass of Jupiter, were located in this image.

While this may look like a single, stunning image, that is just good processing. According to the image release: This 315-million-pixel composite image is comprised of 23 observations made by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Gaps between those observations were filled by 20 Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 images. Any remaining gaps were filled with ground-based data from ESO’s VISTA VIRCAM. 

A link to this massive, full resolution image is also on our website.

More Information

NASA image release