Opening night for CONCERTO

This stunning portrait of

NGC 6334, also known as the Cat’s Paw Nebula, is one of the first images taken by the CONCERTO instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX). The white and pink tones have been combined with an image of the same region taken by the ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) in near-infrared light. CONCERTO is designed to study cosmic bodies that formed between 600 million and 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang to aid our understanding of the first generation of stars.