NGC 6188: Dragons of Ara

Do dragons fight on the altar of the sky? Although it might appear that way, these dragons are illusions made of thin gas and dust. The emission nebula NGC 6188, home to the glowing clouds, is found about 4,000 light years away near the edge of a large molecular cloud unseen at visible wavelengths, in the southern constellation Ara (the Altar).

The Ara OB1 association, home to massive, youthful stars, was born only a few million years ago, creating the dark shapes and generating the nebular gleam with stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation. It's theorized that the star formation was likely incited by winds and supernovas from earlier generations of massive stars, which accumulated and compressed the molecular gas.

The cosmic landscape of NGC 6188 is completed at the lower right by the rare emission nebula NGC 6164, which is also the product of one of the area's colossal O-type stars. Bearing similarity to a number of planetary nebulae, NGC 6164 is a remarkable symmetry of gas and faint halo surrounding its bright stellar nucleus at the bottom.

This remarkable field of vision is more than two degrees across (four complete Moons), corresponding to a distance of over 150 light years from NGC 6188.

Image Credit & Copyright: Shaun Robertson

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