Picture of the Day

A faint blue-green cloud shaped like a squid stretches across the center of the frame, with two tapering lobes reaching left and right from a brighter, knotted middle. It floats against a much larger backdrop of deep red gas that fills the image in wispy, billowing curtains. Scattered white and pale-blue stars dot the scene.

$Wide-field view of a rich starfield showing a bright, dense globular star cluster near the upper right and a complex blue nebula with dark dust lanes in the lower left. The globular cluster appears as a tight, glowing ball of countless tiny white stars fading smoothly into the surrounding field. The lower-left nebula is made of bright blue patches around a few standout stars, crossed by thick, irregular dark clouds that block the stars behind them, while the rest of the frame is sprinkled with stars of different brightness and color, including a few very bright stars with sharp diffraction spikes.$