The Fighting Dragons of Ara, also called the Rim Nebula and cataloged as NGC 6188, comprises dark, star-forming clouds and bright young suns.
Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
The Milky Way’s plane cuts through the northwestern corner of Ara the Altar, blessing this southern constellation with a surplus of deep-sky delights. But perhaps none surpasses the stunning emission nebula known as the Fighting Dragons of Ara, the Rim Nebula, or simply NGC 6188.
The battling mythological beasts face off at the center of this image, their dark bodies enveloped in the reddish glow of ionized hydrogen. The brightest stars in open cluster NGC 6193 (seen above and slightly left of the dragons) rank among the hottest stars known. Their radiation ionizes the hydrogen along the rim of a massive molecular cloud while their powerful stellar winds sculpt the nebula’s intricate silhouettes.
NGC 6188 lies about 4,000 light-years from Earth.
