The Cats Paw Nebula NGC 6334

Reprocessed Cats Paw using Red filter as a luminence layer and Star net to tease out the details of the Nebula

 

 

First rendition of the Cats Paw Nebula

The Cat’s Paw Nebula, also known as the Bear Claw Nebula, is an emission nebula in Scorpius. The nebula is about 50 light years across and lies at an approximate distance of 5,500 light years from Earth. It is one of the nearest H II regions to the solar system. It has the designation NGC 6334 in the New General Catalogue.

The large glowing cloud earned the nickname Cat’s Paw because it looks like a gigantic pawprint of a cat. The nebula is a popular target of study as a nearby example of a vast, very active stellar nursery.

NGC 6334 is a large star forming region, covering an area in the night sky slightly larger than the full Moon. It is one of the most active stellar nurseries producing massive stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. The hot young stars embedded in the nebula are responsible for its glow. The stars are each roughly 10 times as massive as the Sun and were formed relatively recently, within the last few million years.

FACTS

The nebula’s distinctly red glow is the result of an abundance of ionised hydrogen atoms. The dust in NGC 6334 has an extremely low temperature, around -445 F (8 K or -265°C).

The Cat’s Paw Nebula was discovered by the British astronomer John Herschel on June 7, 1837. Herschel used one of the largest telescopes available at the time and observed the nebula from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

NGC 6334 lies near the diffuse nebula NGC 6357, popularly known as the War and Peace Nebula, which also contains a number of young stars, as well as proto-stars embedded within dark disks of gas.

In the future, the Cat’s Paw Nebula will look a bit like multiple Pleiades star clusters, each containing up to several thousand stars.

However, as the nebula is more than 10 times farther away than the Pleiades (Messier 45) and obscured by a lot of dust, the sight won’t be nearly as impressive from Earth.