Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2025

42 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 ASTRO PUBLISHING sive stars’ lively behav- ior, the local star for- mation process will eventually come to a stop. Start with the toe bean at top center on the previous page, which is nicknamed the “Opera House” for its circular, tiered-like structure. The primary drivers for the area’s cloudy blue glow are most likely to- ward its bottom: either the light from the bright yellowish stars or from a nearby source still hidden be- hind the dense, dark brown dust. Just below the orange- brown tiers of dust is a bright yellow star with diffraction spikes. While this massive star has carved away at its immediate sur- roundings, it has been unable to push the gas and dust away to greater dis- tances, creating a com- pact shell of surround- ing material. Look closely to notice small patches, like the tuning fork-shaped area to the Opera House’s immediate left, that contain fewer stars. These seemingly vacant zones indicate the pres- ence of dense fore- ground filaments of dust that are home to still-forming stars and block the light of stars in the background. Toward the image’s center are small, fiery red clumps scattered amongst the brown dust. These glowing red lower left toe bean, seem to be more sharply resolved than others. This is because any in- tervening material be- tween the star and the telescope has been dissi- pated by stellar radia- tion. Near the bottom of that toe bean are small, dense filaments of dust. These tiny clumps of dust have managed to remain despite the in- tense radiation, suggest- ing that they are dense enough to form proto- stars. A small section of yellow at the right notes the location of a still-en- shrouded massive star that has managed to shine through interven- ing material. Across this entire scene are many small yellow stars with dif- fraction spikes. Bright blue-white stars are in the foreground of this Webb image, but some may be a part of the more expansive Cat’s Paw Nebula area. One eyecatching aspect is the bright, red-orange oval at top right. Its low count of background stars implies it is a dense area just beginning its star-formation process. A couple of visible and still-veiled stars are scat- tered throughout this region, which are con- tributing to the illumina- tion of the material in the middle. Some still- enveloped stars leave hints of their presence, like a bow shock at the bottom left, which indi- cates an energetic ejec- tion of gas and dust from a bright source. T his visualization explores a subset of toe bean-reminiscent structures within a section of the Cat’s Paw Nebula, a massive, local star-forming region located approximately 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. [Greg Bacon (STScI), Frank Summers (STScI) − Joseph DePasquale (STScI) − Ralf Crawford (STScI), Leah Hustak (STScI), Christian Nieves (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI) − NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, VISTA] T his zoom-in video shows the location of the Cat’s Paw Nebula on the sky. It begins with a ground-based photo by the late as- trophotographer Akira Fujii, then shows views from the Digitized Sky Survey. The video then hones in on a select portion of the sky to reveal a European Southern Observatory image of the Cat’s Paw Nebula in visible light. The video continues to zoom in on a sec-tion of the Cat’s Paw, which gradually transitions to the stunning image captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in near-infrared light. [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Danielle Kirshenblat (STScI)] sources mark regions where massive star formation is underway, albeit in an obscured manner. Some massive blue-white stars, like the one in the !