This is the closest stellar nursery to Earth, close to Pleiades that are just right of the framed field here, and laying at the same distance. The mouse-over shows a far infrared image of the same field taken in 2017 by the ESA Herschel Space Observatory.
Close to the right edge, in the middle, is visible the famous Baby Eagle Nebula, upside-down.

The Taurus Molecular Cloud
Also called TMC-1, it is an interstellar molecular cloud in the constellations Taurus and Auriga. This cloud hosts a stellar nursery containing hundreds of newly formed stars. The Taurus molecular cloud is only 430 ly away from Earth, making it possibly the nearest large star formation region. It has been important in star formation studies at all wavelengths.
It is also notable for containing many complex molecules, such as cyanopolyynes HCnN for n = 3,5,7,9, and cumulene carbenes H2Cn for n = 3–6.
The Taurus molecular cloud was identified in the past as a part of the Gould Belt, a large structure surrounding the solar system. More recently (January 2020) the Taurus molecular cloud was identified as being part of the much larger Radcliffe wave, a wave-shaped structure in the local arm of the Milky Way (see below).
The newly formed stars in this cloud have an age of 1–2 million years. The Taurus–Auriga association is the stellar association of the cloud.
The many young stars and the close proximity to earth make it uniquely well-suited to search for protoplanetary disks and exoplanets around stars, and to identify brown dwarfs in the association. Members of this region are suited for direct imaging of young exoplanets, which glow brightly in infrared wavelengths.

ESA’s Herschel observatory IR mosaic of TMC-1
This four-color image in Revision B combines Herschel observations at 160 microns (blue), 250 microns (green), 350 microns (split between green and red) and 500 microns (red).
The densest regions are distributed along an intricate network of filaments, teeming with bright clumps: the seeds of future stars. This is a textbook example of the filamentary structures that were spotted by Herschel nearly everywhere in the Galaxy, demonstrating the key role of filaments in star formation.
Herschel observations of the tangled structures in the top right of the image have shown that the material along filaments is not at all static. In fact, the most prominent filaments appear to be drawing matter from their surroundings through a network of lower-density filaments, known as striations, perpendicular to the main filament. In these regions, astronomers found that magnetic fields tend to be perpendicular to the densest, star-forming filaments and parallel to the striations, indicating that they must also play an important role in the processes that lead to stellar birth.
Outside of the field, in LDN1544, a pre-stellar core that will later turn into a star, Herschel detected water vapor – the first time this molecule was ever found in a pre-stellar core – in a huge amount.
Credit: ESA/Herschel/NASA/JPL-Caltech; acknowledgement: R. Hurt (JPL-Caltech)

The Radcliffe Wave
It is the nearest coherent gaseous structure in the Milky Way, dotted with a related high concentration of interconnected stellar nurseries. It stretches about 8800 light years. This structure runs with the trajectory of the Milky Way arms.
It lies at its closest (the Taurus Molecular Cloud) at around 400 light-years and at its farthest about 5,000 light-years (the Cygnus X star complex) from the Sun, always within the Local Arm (Orion Arm) itself Its discovery was announced in January 2020.


Picture 1: the Radcliffe Wave. Credits: Roberto Mura.