Close-up: The Corona Australis Molecular Cloud | Victor Blanco Telescope
Deep inside the constellation of Corona Australis, Latin for “Southern Crown,” lies a treasure trove of star formation known as the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. This molecular cloud, spanning the left half of the image, is one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System, sitting about 430 light-years from Earth.
The primary member is a pre-main-sequence star, meaning it has accumulated almost all of its mass but has not started fusing hydrogen in its core yet—akin to being in the pre-teen stage of life. In 2019, the companion was discovered to be a red dwarf, the least massive and most common type of all hydrogen-fusing stars. Red dwarfs have relatively cool temperatures and live very long lives compared to hotter and more massive stars like our Sun.
Young stars, like the primary member of R Coronae Australis, are incredibly bright and hot. This star’s light reflects off of the nearby clouds of stellar material, forming illuminated regions known as reflection nebulae. The ultraviolet radiation from the young star is sufficient to ionize the gas surrounding it, creating a glowing region known as an emission nebula. Together, these regions form the dual nebula known as NGC 6729, which shows variations in its brightness and shape due to the orbit of the binary star system within it.
The star-forming regions of this image continue on as the eye travels up and to the right, tracing the clouds of bright blue gas that glow from the newborn stars within. This swirling beige and blue region, punctuated by embedded stars, is composed of the reflection nebulae NGC 6726 and NGC 6727. These nebulae extend to the lower right region, connecting with another reflection nebula known as IC 4812.
Bedazzling the top right portion of this image is the globular star cluster NGC 6723, nicknamed the Chandelier Cluster. NGC 6723 is a gravitationally bound collection of tens of thousands to millions of stars in a spherical shape with a notably large fraction of younger stars. Even though the glittering cluster appears to neighbor the stellar nursery of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, it actually sits far beyond it, at about 29,000 light-years away from Earth.
The Corona Australis Molecular Cloud and the Chandelier Cluster make this region popular among astrophotographers. The constellation Corona Australis in which these objects can be seen, or which they border in the case of the Chandelier Cluster, skirts the southern horizon in summer months for observers at mid-northern latitudes, and is better viewed from farther south. As summer approaches, these objects will be well placed for astrophotographers to capture the scene.
The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) was designed specifically for the Dark Energy Survey (DES). It was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and was built and tested at DOE's Fermilab.
NSF NOIRLab, the U.S. National Science Foundation center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the International Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (in cooperation with DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.
The scientific community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence of I’oligam Du’ag to the Tohono O’odham Nation, and Maunakea to the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) community.
Learn about the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope:
https://noirlab.edu/science/programs/ctio/telescopes/victor-blanco-4m-telescope
Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
Image Processing: R. Colombari & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Release Date: July 16, 2026
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