The setting Sun dips below the horizon of the Pacific Ocean, bathing the Paranal platform in light in this amazing aerial image from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The Cerro Paranal mountain top is home to the world’s most advanced ground-based facility for astronomy, hosting the four 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes of the Very Large Telescope, four 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) — all of which are visible in this image. The 4.1-metre Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), also housed at Cerro Paranal, is hidden out of frame.

A very large telescope has taken the best-ever image of the Running Chicken nebula (photo)

On Dec 26, 2023 12:16 39

Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory have captured a new image of the nebula IC 2944, also known as the “Running Chicken,” Sci.News reports.

IC 2944 is located at a distance of almost 6.5 thousand kilometers. light years from Earth in the constellation Centauri.

The brightest zone of the nebula is called IC 2948. Some people think it looks like a chicken’s head, while others think it looks like a goose.

At the center of the nebula is the lambda Centauri, one of the brightest stars in the constellation that can be seen with the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere.

If you enlarge the image, you can see small dark and dense pockets of dust and gas scattered throughout the nebula, as well as a large number of orange, white and blue stars.

This image is a large mosaic consisting of hundreds of individual frames combined with each other. Each photo was taken through filters that transmit light of different colors.

Source speka