The Serpens dark cloud is a very active site of ongoing star formation.
The first image is an optical image of the region taken from the DSS. The population of young stars, most of which are deeply embedded in the dark cloud and therefore invisible in the optical image, are revealed in the second image, which is a RGB composit of deep J, H, and K band images I have obtained at the 3.5 m telescope on Calar Alto. (Note that the optical image shows a slightly larger field-of-view than the infrared image.)
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