December - Purple haze

This picture features DG121, an HII region — a cloud of ionised hydrogen — located in the constellation Puppis. HII regions tend to have irregular structures and lack sharp boundaries, giving them their hazy, yet photogenic, appearance. The brightest star in the DG121 region, seen near the centre in this picture, is HD 60068.

This spectacular image was taken with the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Chilean Atacama Desert.