The Running Chicken Nebula has been revealed in all its glory in a new high-resolution photo taken by a telescope at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF).
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The remarkable image was captured by a survey telescope supporting a Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) site in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.
This nebula is located in the constellation Centaurus, near the lambda star Centauri, nearly 6,500 light-years from Earth. It consists mostly of young stars, less than 30 million years old, that emit intense radiation and give the surrounding hydrogen cloud a pinkish hue.
Its official name would be IC2944, or Lambda Centauri Nebula, but it gets its funny nickname “walking chicken” because of the bird's beak shape that some see in its brightest part.
The image is actually a large mosaic of hundreds of individual photos taken with INAF's OmegaCAM wide-field camera and then carefully stitched together to create this fresco of a starry sky the size of “25 full moons.”
The photos used to create this mosaic were collected as part of an INAF project aimed at better understanding the life cycle of stars.