Do you see a ghost in this fog?

This cosmic ghost focuses its bright white eyes on the Earth. Do you dare to look at this beautiful nebula?

NGC 2080 – also called the Ghost Head Nebula – is an emission nebula located in the southern constellation Goldfish. The nebula is located 168,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a galaxy close to our Milky Way. The mass of this galaxy is ten billion suns and it can be seen with the naked eye at night in the southern hemisphere as a kind of mysterious cloud.

The Ghost Head Nebula is a star-forming region located just south of the 30 Dorados Nebula. The ghost's bright “eyes” are two glowing, hot bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen. The left bubble – A1 – was created by intense hot radiation and strong stellar winds from a massive star. The right bubble is called (surprisingly!) A2, and is filled with more dust and contains many more massive stars. The stars in both A1 and A2 were born within the past 10,000 years, because the clouds of gas surrounding the newborn stars had not yet been broken up by stellar radiation.

This image of NGC 2080 was taken in 2010 by the Hubble Space Telescope. Different filters were used to better display certain areas. For example, the green light on the left comes from glowing oxygen produced by strong stellar winds coming from a massive star outside the image. Red and blue nebulae are regions containing a lot of hydrogen gas, which is heated by nearby stars. The white area in the center hides many warm, massive stars. The intense radiation from these stars has created a “hole” in the nebula.