Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2026

37 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026 dark filaments in the nebula look like the skeleton of our space bat. These structures are colder and denser accumulations of gas than their surroundings, with dust grains that block the visible light from stars behind. Named after a large catalogue of bright star-forming re- gions in the southern sky, the most prominent clouds here are RCW 94, which represents the right wing of the bat, and RCW 95, which forms the body, while the other parts of the bat have no official designation. This stunning stellar nursery was L ocated about 10,000 light-years away, this ‘cosmic bat’ is flying between the southern constel- lations of Circinus and Norma. Span- ning an area of the sky equivalent to four full Moons, it looks as if it's trying to hunt the glowing spot above it for food. This nebula is a stellar nursery, a vast cloud of gas and dust from which stars are born. The infant stars within it release enough energy to excite hydrogen atoms around them, making them glow with the intense shade of red seen in this eye-catching image. The T his image shows a cloud of gas and dust, shaped like a cosmic bat. The image was obtained mostly in visible light with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The intense red glow comes from hydro- gen atoms ionised by the intense radiation of young stars within the cloud. The image also includes addi- tional infrared data captured by ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), also at Paranal. The most prominent clouds here are RCW 94, which rep- resents the right wing of the bat, and RCW 95, which forms the body, while the other parts of the bat have no official designation. [ESO/VPHAS+ team/VVV team] captured with the VST, a telescope owned and operated by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and hosted at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Ata- cama Desert. The VST has the perfect capabilities to capture these large spooky crea- tures. It hosts the OmegaCAM, a state-of-the-art 268-megapixel cam- era, which enables the VST to image vast areas of the sky. This image was pieced together by combining ob- servations through different filters, transparent to different colours or wavelengths of light. Most of the bat’s shape, including the red glow, was captured in visible light as part of the VST Photometric H α Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+). Additional infrared data add a splash of colour in the densest parts of the nebula, and were obtained with ESO’s Visible and Infrared Sur- vey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey. Both sur- veys are open to everyone who wants to dive deep in this endless pool of cosmic photographs. !