Pic of the Week: Cat’s Paw Nebula

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Image (Credit): NASA’s JWST poster showing the Cat’s Paw Nebula. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Designer: Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI))

This week’s image highlights a NASA poster that you can download (in a variety of versions). It shows the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334) as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Here is a short summary of what you are seeing from NASA:

Located approximately 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, the Cat’s Paw Nebula offers scientists the opportunity to study the turbulent cloud-to-star process in great detail. Webb’s observation of the nebula in near-infrared light builds upon previous studies by NASA’s Hubble and retired Spitzer Space Telescope in visible- and infrared-light, respectively.

With its sharp resolution, Webb shows never-before-seen structural details and features: Massive young stars are carving away at nearby gas and dust, while their bright starlight is producing a bright nebulous glow represented in blue. It’s a temporary scene where the disruptive young stars, with their relatively short lives and luminosity, have a brief but important role in the region’s larger story. As a consequence of these massive stars’ lively behavior, the local star formation process will eventually come to a stop.

For more details and videos, visits the NASA page on the Cat’s Paw Nebula, which helps to commemorate the third anniversary of the JWST.

Pic of the Week: The Sculptor Galaxy

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Image (Credit): The Sculptor Galaxy. (ESO/VLT)

This week’s image is from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile. It shows the Sculptor Galaxy, which is about 11 million light-years away.

Here is a description of what you are seeing:

This image shows a detailed, thousand-colour image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Regions of pink light are spread throughout this whole galactic snapshot, which come from ionised hydrogen in star-forming regions. These areas have been overlaid on a map of already formed stars in Sculptor to create the mix of pinks and blues seen here...

To create this map of the Sculptor Galaxy, which is 11 million light-years away and is also known as NGC 253, the researchers observed it for over 50 hours with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s VLT. The team had to stitch together over 100 exposures to cover an area of the galaxy about 65 000 light-years wide.

According to co-author Kathryn Kreckel from Heidelberg University, Germany, this makes the map a potent tool: “We can zoom in to study individual regions where stars form at nearly the scale of individual stars, but we can also zoom out to study the galaxy as a whole.”

Pic of the Week: Tropical Cyclones Imelda and Humberto

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Image (Credit): Tropical Storm Imelda (left) and Hurricane Humberto off the eastern coast of the United States on September 28, 2025. The image also shows the outlines of the areas covered by clouds in North America and Caribbean. (NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership)

This week’s image comes from NASA’s Earth Observatory. It caught two tropical cyclones stirring up the Atlantic Ocean in late September. Both Tropical Storm Imelda and Hurricane Humberto caused plenty of problems off of the east coast of the United States without ever making landfall.

Here is more on the two storms from NASA:

Imelda had already brought tropical storm conditions to portions of the central and northwestern Bahamas. Prior to becoming a named storm, the system also lashed Puerto Rico and eastern Cuba with heavy rain. In the coming days, Imelda could intensify and cause flash and urban flooding along the coast of the Carolinas, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Although Humberto lurked farther from land, its effects still reached coastlines due to its massive size. Dangerous surf conditions affected beaches in the northern Caribbean, the Bahamas, and Bermuda, as well as much of the U.S. East Coast. Mid-Atlantic and even some Northeast states could see large swells and rip currents stemming from the storm, forecasters warned.

Pic of the Week: Sagittarius B2

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Image (Credit): Sagittarius B2 as captured by the JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Adam Ginsburg (University of Florida), Nazar Budaiev (University of Florida), Taehwa Yoo (University of Florida); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

This week’s busy image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows the Sagittarius B2 molecular cloud, which is about 26,000 light-years away.

Here is more from NASA about the image:

Stars, gas and cosmic dust in the Sagittarius B2 molecular cloud glow in near-infrared light, captured by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). In this light, astronomers see more of the region’s diverse, colorful stars, but less of its gas and dust structure. Webb’s instruments each provide astronomers with important information that help build a more complete picture of what is happening in this intriguing portion of the center of our galaxy.

Pic of the Week: The Indescribable NGC 2775

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Image (Credit): NGC 2775, which is 67 million light-years away, as captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team)

This week’s image is from the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the odd galaxy NGC 2275 that is hard to describe. Is it an elliptical galaxy, a spiral galaxy, or something else?

The ESA weighs in on the issue below:

NGC 2775 sports a smooth, featureless centre that is devoid of gas, resembling an elliptical galaxy. It also has a dusty ring with patchy star clusters, like a spiral galaxy. Which is it, then: spiral or elliptical — or neither?

Because we can only view NGC 2775 from one angle, it’s difficult to say for sure. Some researchers have classified NGC 2775 as a spiral galaxy because of its feathery ring of stars and dust, while others have classified it as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies have features common to both spiral and elliptical galaxies.

It’s not yet known exactly how lenticular galaxies come to be, and they might form in a variety of ways. Lenticular galaxies might be spiral galaxies that have merged with other galaxies, or that have mostly run out of star-forming gas and lost their prominent spiral arms. They also might have started out more similar to elliptical galaxies, then collected gas into a disk around them.

Some evidence suggests that NGC 2775 has merged with other galaxies in the past. Invisible in this Hubble image, NGC 2775 has a tail of hydrogen gas that stretches almost 100 000 light-years around the galaxy. This faint tail could be the remnant of one or more galaxies that wandered too close to NGC 2775 before being stretched apart and absorbed. If NGC 2775 merged with other galaxies in the past, it could explain the galaxy’s strange appearance today.