Two small regions of our Milky Way galaxy where stars are born, designated NGC 3576 and NGC 3603. They are found in the constellation Carina. If you could see them with the unaided eye, they would appear about the same size in the sky as the full Moon. But they are so faint that only long exposure photography will reveal their presence. The white points of light are a truly insignificant number of Milky Way stars that are located between us and the two objects—like a haze of dust clouding your view. Yet every white dot is a star and likely a system of planets.

Continue the Voyage: Let the good folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore show you other star forming regions in the Milky Way galaxy as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the Earth: http://hubblesite.org.

Credit: © 1999-2002, Anglo-Australian Observatory, photograph by David Malin.