Barnard 3 Reveals Itself to the World

This amazing image reveals the Barnard 3 nebula in exquisite detail, as it appears in its entirety in the night sky. The object is located about 1,000 light-years away from the band of the Milky Way, and is considered to be a stellar nursery.

Objects such as these are rather common. However, Barnard 3 is special due to its makeup. The green halo making up its outer layer consists of dust that has roughly the same chemical composition as that found in smog on Earth.

The dust making up the red cloud at the core of the nebula is probably a lot more metallic than the one in the green cold, and also cooler. At the very core of the red cloud lies HD 278942, a star so bright that astronomers believes it single-handedly lights up the entire nebula.

To the left of the image, the brighter agglomeration of gas is made up of the same stuff as the green cloud, only significantly denser. This image was snapped using the NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).