The VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is a 4.1-metre wide-field telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile and is run by the European Southern Observatory.
In this zoom sequence we start with a broad panorama of the Milky Way, including the familiar constellation of Orion. As we close in on part of the adjacent constellation of Monoceros we start to see faint clouds and in the final part of the video the full glory of the Monoceros R2 star-forming region is revealed in a new image from the VISTA infrared telescope.
Credit:
ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA/Digitized Sky Survey 2/A. Fujii. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, Davide De Martin. Music: John Dyson (from the album “Darklight”)
More after the break.
A new infrared image from ESO’s VISTA survey telescope reveals an extraordinary landscape of glowing tendrils of gas, dark clouds and young stars within the constellation of Monoceros (the Unicorn). This star-forming region, known as Monoceros R2, is embedded within a huge dark cloud. The region is almost completely obscured by interstellar dust when viewed in visible light, but is spectacular in the infrared.
An active stellar nursery lies hidden inside a massive dark cloud rich in molecules and dust in the constellation of Monoceros. Although it appears close in the sky to the more familiar Orion Nebula it is actually almost twice as far from Earth, at a distance of about 2700 light-years. In visible light a grouping of massive hot stars creates a beautiful collection of reflection nebulae where the bluish starlight is scattered from parts of the dark, foggy outer layers of the molecular cloud. However, most of the new-born massive stars remain hidden as the thick interstellar dust strongly absorbs their ultraviolet and visible light.
via ESO – eso1039 – VISTA Reveals the Secret of the Unicorn.
