DECam Captures Star-Forming Region Resembling Van Gogh's 'Starry Night'

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 570-megapixel instrument on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, has produced an image of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud that evokes Van Gogh's The Starry Night. Located 430 light-years from Earth, this region is one of the nearest star-forming areas, containing thousands of protostars and young stars. The image also features the globular cluster NGC 6723 (Chandelier Cluster) in the upper right, which is 27,000 light-years away and unrelated to the cloud. The Hubble Space Telescope recently imaged NGC 6723, whose stars are up to 10 billion years old. DECam uses 62 CCD sensors for science and 12 for guiding, with a four-meter mirror and specialized filters. The full-resolution image is 324 MB and 56.6 megapixels, though scientists often crop the 570-megapixel raw data. NOIRLab processed the image with R. Colombari and M. Zamani.