This chart shows the location of the RCW 94 and RCW 95 nebulae between the Circinus and Norma constellations. This map shows most of the stars visible to the unaided eye under good conditions. The location of the nebulae is marked with a red circle.
ESO, IAU and Sky & Telescope
For Bible literalists who insist on clinging to the absurd and demonstrably false belief that the Bible is an inerrant science textbook, the latest image from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope (VST) in Chile may induce a bout of cognitive dissonance — and fittingly so, given that it's Halloween. The image shows an immense ‘bat’ shape appearing to hover ominously in space.
But fear not — this ‘bat’ is simply a striking example of pareidolia. In reality, it’s a vast cloud of interstellar gas. And even if it *were* a cosmic creature flapping its wings across the heavens, it’s about 100,000 light-years away, meaning we’re seeing it as it appeared when our early African ancestors were honing the physical and social capabilities that would one day enable them to successfully migrate into colder Eurasian environments. Or, if you prefer the creationist timeline, roughly 90,000 years before ‘Creation Week’.
The so-called ‘bat’, properly known as the RCW 94/95 nebulae, is a stellar nursery. The young stars forming within it emit intense, ionising radiation that excites the hydrogen atoms in the surrounding gas, causing them to glow a vivid red.
If they could see it, which they couldn't, of course, because they lacked the technology, imagine the terror the Bronze Age authors of the Genesis tales would have felt seeing an image like that hovering over the Middle Eastern night sky. They cowered in a demon-haunted world in which natural phenomena were attributed to supernatural gods, so something like that might well have started a new religion.
About the RCW 94/95 Nebulae.The European Southern Observatory describes the image in more detail in a European Southern Observatory press release.
Designation: RCW 94 & RCW 95
Type: Emission nebulae / H II regions
Location: Constellation Circinus, Southern Milky Way Distance: ~100,000 light-years from Earth Nature: Stellar nursery — regions of active star formation
These nebulae are composed primarily of hydrogen gas, which glows red when energised by the intense ultraviolet radiation from young, massive stars forming within the cloud. The radiation ionises the hydrogen atoms, causing them to emit light as they recombine — the characteristic crimson hue seen in the image.
The complex structure is shaped by powerful stellar winds, radiation pressure, and turbulence within the interstellar medium. Although to human eyes the shape resembles a giant bat, the pattern is a chance alignment — a prime example of pareidolia, the tendency to perceive familiar forms in random patterns.
New image captures spooky bat signal in the skyImages of the 'bat' are available for wallpaper:
A spooky bat has been spotted flying over the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal site in Chile, right in time for Halloween. Thanks to its wide field of view, the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) was able to capture this large cloud of cosmic gas and dust, whose mesmerising appearance resembles the silhouette of a bat.
Located about 10 000 light-years away, this ‘cosmic bat’ is flying between the southern constellations of Circinus and Norma. Spanning an area of the sky equivalent to four full Moons, it looks as if it's trying to hunt the glowing spot above it for food.
This nebula is a stellar nursery, a vast cloud of gas and dust from which stars are born. The infant stars within it release enough energy to excite hydrogen atoms around them, making them glow with the intense shade of red seen in this eye-catching image. The dark filaments in the nebula look like the skeleton of our space bat. These structures are colder and denser accumulations of gas than their surroundings, with dust grains that block the visible light from stars behind.
Named after a large catalogue of bright star-forming regions in the southern sky, the most prominent clouds here are RCW 94, which represents the right wing of the bat, and RCW 95, which forms the body, while the other parts of the bat have no official designation.
This stunning stellar nursery was captured with the VST, a telescope owned and operated by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and hosted at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The VST has the perfect capabilities to capture these large spooky creatures. Onboard it is OmegaCAM, a state-of-the-art 268-megapixel camera, which enables the VST to image vast areas of the sky.
This image was pieced together by combining observations through different filters, transparent to different colours or wavelengths of light. Most of the bat’s shape, including the red glow, was captured in visible light as part of the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+). Additional infrared data add a splash of colour in the densest parts of the nebula, and were obtained with ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey. Both surveys are open to everyone who wants to dive deep in this endless pool of cosmic photographs. Dare to look closer, and let your curiosity be haunted by the wonders that await in the dark. Happy Halloween!
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For those still insisting the universe is a mere six thousand years old and made just for us, nebulae like RCW 94/95 present awkward questions. Why would an all-powerful deity create a sprawling star-factory a hundred thousand light-years away — complete with dramatic lighting effects — only to leave it invisible until humans invented telescopes, and then pretend it had been running for millions of years? It seems an extraordinary amount of cosmic theatre for an audience that wasn’t scheduled to take its seats yet.
Meanwhile, astronomy continues to do what creation myths never could: reveal the universe as it really is — ancient, vast, and spectacular beyond anything Bronze Age storytellers could have imagined. And if every now and then a nebula looks a bit like a giant bat swooping through the void, that’s just a bonus. After all, nature has a better sense of humour than dogma ever will.
Happy Halloween — may your ghosts be gaseous, your monsters ionised, and your universe gloriously, scientifically real.
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