Panning across a new image of the Lagoon Nebula from the VST

This video sequence gives a close-up look at a richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula captured by the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of eleven public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes. Together these are providing a vast legacy of publicly available data for the global astronomical community.