Pretty, isn’t it? My first glance at this image made me think, "Oooh, sweet." My second glance made me think "Hey, wait a sec…" and my third, after reading the scientific paper, made me smile. Terzan 5 is a pretty interesting place.

It’s just over 19,000 light years away, toward the galactic center. That area is lousy with thick patches of dust, making it very difficult to see anything, like trying to see a forest through a thick fog. These images were taken with the Very Large Telescope (srsly), an 8-meter goliath in Chile. The observations were done in the infrared, which can travel more easily through the thick dust — specifically at 1.2 and 2.2 microns (our eyes can see out to about 0.8 microns; anything longer than that is infrared). Amazingly, this image is a total of only four minutes of observations, two minutes in each filter! And while the size of the image is comfortably larger than the full Moon on the sky, the resolution is about 0.1 arcseconds, about that of Hubble! That’s why the second time I glanced at the image I was amazed; the star images are sharp and clear.