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A spooky bat has been spotted flying over the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Paranal site in Chile, right in time for Halloween. Thanks to its wide field of view, the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) was able to capture this large cloud of cosmic gas and dust, whose mesmerizing appearance resembles the silhouette of a bat.

Located about 10,000 light-years away, this "cosmic bat" is flying between the southern constellations of Circinus and Norma. Spanning an area of the sky equivalent to four full moons, it looks as if it's trying to hunt the glowing spot above it for food.

This nebula is a stellar nursery, a vast cloud of gas and dust from which stars are born. The infant stars within it release enough energy to excite hydrogen atoms around them, making them glow with the intense shade of red seen in this eye-catching image. The dark filaments in the nebula look like the skeleton of our space bat.

These structures are colder and denser accumulations of gas than their surroundings, with dust grains that block the visible light from stars behind.

Named after a large catalog of , the most prominent clouds here are RCW 94, which represents the right wing of the bat, and RCW 95, which forms the body, while the other parts of the bat have no official designation.

This stunning stellar nursery was captured with the , a telescope owned and operated by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and hosted at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert.

The VST has the perfect capabilities to capture these large spooky creatures. Onboard it is OmegaCAM, a state-of-the-art 268-megapixel camera, which enables the VST to image vast areas of the sky.

This image was pieced together by combining observations through different filters, transparent to different colors or wavelengths of light. Most of the bat's shape, including the red glow, was captured in visible light as part of the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge ().

Additional infrared data add a splash of color in the densest parts of the nebula, and were obtained with ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy () as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea () survey.

Both surveys are open to everyone who wants to dive deep into this endless pool of .