The Chamaeleon Cloud Complex is a gigantic star-formation region. It is made up of three main sections:
- Chamaeleon I (Cha I)
- Chamaeleon II (Cha II)
- Chamaeleon III (Cha III)
The main image above shows the Chamaeleon III dark cloud, in the shape of an "A". If you look to the very bottom, a small part of the Chamaeleon II dark cloud is visible. To the left of the image you can spot a section of the Chamaeleon I dark cloud.
Being 600 light-years away, Cha I is one of the closest star-forming regions from Earth. It contains a total of approximately 237 stars. The dust cloud was imaged in 1981 through X-Ray filters and shows the activity within, as you can see on the left.Chamaeleon II is also active, but much less than Cha I. Only 50 stars have been detected there.Cha III on the other hand is completely empty of star-forming activity. To our knowledge, there are no new stars being born in this third dust cloud.Although there are several distinctive shapes within the dust clouds, only one is officially cataloged, the Thumbprint Nebula. It is a small non-star-forming bok globule that resembles a thumbprint in gray ink.The
Thumbprint Nebula can be spotted in our image near the bottom right of the "A" shape. It is circled in orange below. A galaxy can be found nearby,
IC 3104, annotated above the brightest blue star.
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