Cosmic selfie, Runner Chicken nebula in extreme HD

Talk about a cosmic Christmas that breaks the mold of traditional turkey dinners and such! This year, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is giving us a special treat: Christmas chicken from space! Don’t worry, it’s not a new space recipe, but the Running Chicken Nebula, a place where young stars are partying, and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) brings us the image in high definition, as if we were zooming in from the living room!

So, this stellar party is happening in the constellation Centaurus, about 6,500 light-years away. Not bad for a space party! The young stars in this nebula are like rock stars, radiating so much energy that the hydrogen around them glows in shades of pink. It’s the perfect setting for the galactic concert! The Chicken Runner Nebula is not just a dish, it’s a whole stellar buffet that stretches across the sky like 25 full moons. Can you believe it? And inside this nebula is a bright area called IC 2948, which some see as the chicken’s head and others as its butt. There’s the cosmic debate!

The ethereal, pastel shapes of the gas and dust plumes are like the abstract art of the universe. It’s almost as if the stars were cosmic artists! At the center of it all, like the star of the show, is IC 2944, with its vertical glowing structure that looks like a pillar, a true diva on the stellar stage. Lambda Centauri, a star we see from Earth, is also in the cast, a little closer to us than the nebula, but equally dazzling. An old school star! But it’s not all joy and laughter at this cosmic party. Young stars, though bright, are not exactly cheerful, their intense radiation shattering their surroundings, like chickens on a farm…. but in space!

Ah! But there are heroes in this cosmic story, like the globules of Bok, who are like the survivors of ultraviolet bombardment. Imagine them as small fortresses in the midst of galactic chaos! Zoom in, and you will see incredible things: small pockets of dust and gas scattered throughout the nebula. Like cosmic bonbons scattered across the universe! In addition to the nebulae, there are orange, white and blue stars, like a fireworks display! A real feast for the eyes! This amazing image is like a giant mosaic made of hundreds of photos carefully stitched together. Imagine the work behind it, how to make a stellar collage!

The photos were taken using different color filters, and then combined to obtain this amazing result. It’s like the cosmic edition of a group photo! And all this was made possible by OmegaCAM at the VST, an Italian telescope under ESO’s tutelage in Chile, the perfect place to capture the beauty of the southern sky in visible light! So there you have it, a cosmic Christmas that breaks all the molds. Keep exploring and enjoying the universe, which always has something great in store for us!