Pic of the Week: Cosmic Smokescreen

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NGC 6530 as captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO, O. De Marco)

This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows a fantastic array of colors from a portion of NGC 6530, which is about 4,350 light-years from Earth.

Here is more about this image from the European Space Agency (ESA):

A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope…The cluster is set within the larger Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctly smokey appearance; clouds of interstellar gas and dust stretch from one side of this image to the other.

You can also watch this short video that pans over the cluster.