Capturing the birth of stars in the Seagull Nebula
Published 22 October 2026
This image featuring the head of the Seagull Nebula was one of many ComCam images that led to the success of Rubin First Look and helped to document the observatory’s excellent performance.
Before the LSST Camera there was ComCam, the Rubin Observatory’s engineering test camera.
Two years ago, image testing with ComCam began. As part of the test phase, ComCam captured – in breathtaking detail – the star formation taking place in the Seagull Nebula.
The spectacular pink and blue colours of this nebula are caused by the rich star formation within it. When stars are born in molecular clouds, they emit ultraviolet radiation hot enough to energise the surrounding hydrogen gas and cause it to glow. The pressure of this radiation sweeps away light-obscuring material, such as dust, and makes the glowing hydrogen gas visible. In this image these regions appear pink. The contrasting blue haze is composed of dust particles reflecting the light of the other young stars in the area.
To study regions such as the Seagull Nebula is to learn the early history of our Sun and our planet
Professor Tim Naylor is the Norman Lockyer Chair in Astrophysics at the University of Exeter, one of the 36 institutions in the LSST:UK Consortium. His focus is on star and planet formation and extrasolar planets. He said: “Star formation and planet formation are inextricably intertwined, so to study regions such as the Seagull Nebula is to learn the early history of our Sun and our planet, setting the context for the emergence of life and intelligence on Earth.
“The Legacy Survey of Space and Time will provide deep multicolour images of young stars yielding information about the dusty discs which surround young stars within which planets are formed. But it will also monitor the brightness of these stars for ten years, allowing us to study changes in the sometimes violent environments in which planets are born.”
In the run-up to the launch of the full survey, the image provided an opportunity for the Rubin team to test the observatory’s hardware and software systems, as well as the image processing pipelines that would later be used with the much larger images captured by the LSST Camera.
The image also gave Rubin’s image processing team early experience of working with the complex structures found in star-forming regions. This helped the team identify and solve processing challenges that would later arise with the much larger images taken by the LSST Camera images.
More details about the image
Located about 3700 light-years away from Earth, between the constellations of Monoceros (The Unicorn) and Canis Major (The Great Dog), lie three expansive clouds of gas. These clouds, Sharpless 2-292, Sharpless 2-296, and Sharpless 2-297, form a shape that looks like a seagull in flight. Sharpless 2-292 represents the head of the nebulous bird and is pictured here.
Sharpless 2-292 is a cloud of ionized hydrogen gas, known as an H II region, within IC 2177. The source of Sharpless 2-292 is HD 53367, a triple star system of massive young stars that sits at the top of the dark, jagged ridge in this image where it represents the Seagull’s blue eye.
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Image credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA Image Processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)