Red Bloom of The Gum Nebula above Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile

Red Bloom of The Gum Nebula above Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile

Below the southern skies, the telescopes of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, bask in the starlight of the brilliant Milky Way. Speckled with multi-colored stars, our home galaxy in this image stretches down into the city-lit horizon, just grazing past the 4-meter Víctor M. Blanco Telescope (left) and the 1.5-meter SMARTS Telescope (right). 

The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds that accompany our home galaxy are seen to the left of the Blanco telescope. In between the telescopes blooms a deep shade of red that permeates through the tendrils of the Milky Way. This is the Gum Nebula, an emission nebula that blazes with the light of gas ionized by its host stars about 1,400 light years from Earth. From our perspective it holds a bountiful number of cosmic objects, from globular clusters, to the Vela Pulsar, and even to an 11,000-year-old supernova remnant.

Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA)/T. Slovinský

Image Date: June 14, 2023

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