DECam captures stars and nebulae of "The Starry Night"

The 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has imaged a patch of sky in the constellation Corona Australis, where nebulae, a star cluster, and a stellar nursery blend together.

The camera sits on the 4-meter Víctor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile. It has 74 detectors and a lens nearly a meter across. On the left of the frame lies the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud — one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System, about 430 light-years away.

Hidden in the orange cloud at the edge of the frame is the binary system R Coronae Australis. Its primary is a pre-main-sequence star (it has gathered almost all its mass but has not yet started fusing hydrogen in its core). The companion, found in 2019, turned out to be a red dwarf — the most common type of star. The two orbit each other every 43–47 years.

Light from the young, hot star reflects off surrounding clouds of material and also ionizes the gas around it. This formed the dual nebula NGC 6729, which shifts in brightness and shape as the binary system moves.

In the upper right glows the globular cluster NGC 6723 — the "Chandelier Cluster." It appears to neighbor the molecular cloud, but it actually sits much farther out — about 29,000 light-years from Earth.