Photo of a beautiful stellar nursery 522 light-years away

The Hubble Space Telescope provides a stunning updated image of the Chamaeleon Cloud 1 in the Southern Hemisphere sky.

The Chamaeleon Cloud 1 is one of the three main regions of the Chamaeleon Complex - a massive star-forming region that spans 65 light-years, covering almost the entire area of ​​the constellation Yan. It is one of the closest active stellar nurseries to Earth, just 522 light-years away.

The Chamaeleon Cloud 1 captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This beautiful image is compiled from 23 different observations of the Hubble space telescope. It shows Chamaeleon 1's dark clouds of gas and dust lit by young blue stars.

Hubble also captured patches of light and arcs of gas between the stars, known as Herbig-Haro objects. They form when gas ejected from a "protostar" (very young star) collides with a cloud of gas and dust and is powered by jets from the nova.

"The orange-white cloud at the bottom of the image is home to one of these protostars. Its brilliant jets of hot gas are ejected in narrow swirls from the protostar's poles, creating the object. Herbig-Haro HH 909A," NASA said in a description of the image last week.

Launched into orbit on April 24, 1990, the Hubble telescope has operated almost continuously for more than three decades, making millions of observations of distant planets, stars and galaxies. However, the instrument is already showing signs of "age" and is about to be replaced by the 100 times more powerful James Webb space telescope.