It looks like a gigantic treasure chest left open among the stars — but instead of gold and jewels, this strange cosmic structure contains dozens of newborn suns. This new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals the aptly named Treasure Chest, a colorful cloud of gas and dust in the Carina Nebula, one of the Milky Way's richest star-forming regions.

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the Southern Hemisphere constellation Carina, the nebula stretches roughly 260 light-years across and contains some of the most massive stars in our galaxy, as well as tens of thousands of young protostars. It's also home to the "Cosmic Cliffs," which appeared in JWST's first collection of science images, released in 2022.

The Treasure Chest is a cometary globule, an isolated cloud with a dense, dark head and a sweeping tail. Although such objects are named for their resemblance to comets, this one looks more like a wooden chest with its lid propped open and light spilling from inside.

JWST's Near-Infrared Camera reveals the source of that glow: a compact cluster of about 70 young stars embedded in the dust. The most massive one is a rare O-type star — extremely large, bright, and short-lived stars — measuring roughly 19 times as massive as the sun.

Astronomers estimate that the cluster is around 1.3 million years old, although earlier estimates suggested it could be as young as 100,000 years. Many of its stars are still surrounded by the gas and dust from which they were born. Over time, radiation from the cluster's stars will disperse that material, exposing stars that are currently hidden.

The Treasure Chest's unusual shape is also influenced by something outside the JWST image. About 39 light-years away, as measured across the sky, is Eta Carinae, the most luminous object in the Carina Nebula. Eta Carinae famously underwent its "Great Eruption" in the 19th century, when it briefly became one of the brightest stars in Earth's night sky. The system contains at least two stars, including one about 100 times as massive as the sun and roughly 5 million times as luminous. Together with the nearby Trumpler 16 star cluster, its intense radiation and stellar winds are blasting away the Treasure Chest's less-dense gas and helping to sculpt the cloud into its distinctive shape.

The Treasure Chest won't always look like this. Radiation and winds from the young stars inside it, combined with the assault from massive stars nearby, will gradually erode the remaining gas and dust. Eventually, the cosmic chest will disappear, revealing its true jewels — the stars within it.

Venus is something of a frustration for stargazers. It's the brightest planet and the easiest to see, while the sight of it close to a crescent moon is one of the most achingly beautiful sights in the sky. Yet it gives almost nothing away.

Mars has its reddish color. Saturn rewards even a small telescope with its spectacular rings. Jupiter has moons, belts and an obvious disk. Venus, meanwhile, spends months blazing away in twilight looking exactly like what people who do not stargaze assume a star should look like — a brilliant white point. What we're seeing is sunlight reflected by its global cloud cover, which in turn makes it impossible to see in any detail.

But every now and then, it does something revealing by becoming a crescent. That is when Venus, an inner planet relative to Earth, finally makes sense.

Put a small telescope on Venus this week and its appearance is completely different from the dazzling dot seen with the naked eye. This week, its disk will dim from 36% to 32% lit as it shrinks toward a thinner crescent as September progresses. At the same time, its apparent disk is getting larger because Venus is moving closer to Earth.

Those two changes are connected. Venus reached its greatest eastern elongation, about 46 degrees from the sun, on Aug. 15. It's now swinging around the inside of its smaller, faster orbit of the sun towards inferior conjunction on Oct. 24, when it will pass roughly between Earth and the sun, and be lost in the sun's glare. Before that, it will reach its peak — greatest brilliancy — in the evening sky on Sept. 18, shining at magnitude -4.8 while just 26% lit. That's the sweet spot, when its increasing angular size and decreasing crescent combine at their brightest, as seen from Earth (though its modeled visual brightness peaks a few days later, around Sept.22). After that, it becomes an increasingly dim crescent.

Seeing Venus as a crescent makes the geometry beautifully obvious. We are no longer looking across the solar system towards the brightly illuminated side of Venus. We are increasingly looking at the planet from behind, towards its night side, with sunlight catching only one edge.

It is almost the same idea as a crescent moon — except Venus is another world tens of millions of miles away. As it passes roughly between Earth and the sun on Oct. 24, it will be 0.27 AU away — equivalent to 25 million miles (40 million kilometers). At its farthest, Venus can be 162 million miles (261 million kilometers) from Earth.

The phases of Venus were historically important. When Galileo observed Venus through a telescope in the early 17th century, seeing it display a broad range of phases helped demolish the traditional Ptolemaic model in which Venus was supposed to orbit Earth in a way that could not produce the full sequence he observed.

Four centuries later, the same observation remains one of the simplest ways to understand our place in the solar system.

Venus becomes far more interesting when it stops looking its best through the naked eye and instead becomes a "wow" moment in a small telescope. As the "Evening Star" sinks lower into twilight, we're not just seeing a crescent — we're seeing a planet orbit the sun.

What's happening and when to look

Venus remains an evening object throughout September, but it is rapidly becoming more challenging from mid-northern latitudes. Look very low towards the west-southwest shortly after sunset, where it should be obvious because practically nothing else in the twilight comes close to its brilliance.

Do not search for Venus with a telescope or binoculars while the sun is still above the horizon. Wait until sunset and make sure the sun has disappeared before pointing optical equipment anywhere near the western sky.

Venus will move through Virgo during the coming days before a particularly attractive conjunction on Sept. 14, when a 16%-lit waxing crescent moon will pass extremely close to a 29%-lit Venus. Two crescents together.

How and when I'm watching it

Venus is one of those objects I prefer to revisit several times rather than observe once. A single look shows a crescent, but observing every week reveals movement.

I'll mostly use my small spotting scope in the front yard to look at Venus as a crescent this month, but if I'm short on time, I'll use some 10x50 binoculars, which can also reveal the phase. The trick is not to expect surface detail — just a clean geometric shape.

Atmospheric turbulence near the horizon can make Venus wobble and shimmer, but its phase usually cuts through.

Stargazer's corner: Sept. 4–10, 2026

With the moon now past last quarter, the early evening sky is finally free from bright moonlight. It's an excellent opportunity to revisit the Milky Way, along with star clusters, nebulas and other deep-sky objects before autumn gradually takes over and its bright center slumps into the horizon. Before dawn, the waning crescent moon moves through Taurus, passing close to Mars on Sept. 6 in Gemini, while brilliant Venus continues to dominate the western twilight after sunset. The dazzling planet remains the unmistakable evening beacon, shining low above the west shortly after sunset. Saturn, meanwhile, continues to brighten in the east during the late evening, making this an increasingly good time to point binoculars or, better still, a small telescope toward the ringed planet.

Constellation of the week: Pisces

Pisces is easy to overlook. Its faint stars form two celestial fish joined by a long cord, creating a broad V-shape beneath the easy-to-find Great Square of Pegasus in the eastern evening sky after dark this month.

This week is a great time to find it because Neptune soon reaches opposition within Pisces, making the distant planet brighter than at any other time this year. Although Neptune needs binoculars or a telescope to spot it, learning the constellation

Pisces has been associated with mythology and water for thousands of years, but finding its subtle pattern also signals that the autumn constellations are beginning to take over the night sky.

In this single Hubble Space Telescope image, tens of thousands — possibly millions — of stars bound tightly by gravity sparkle as one. This is NGC 6723, a glittering globular cluster about 27,000 light-years away, in the constellation Sagittarius.

Also known as the Chandelier Cluster, this swarm of stars is one of about 150 known globular clusters that orbit in the halo of the Milky Way, though others may remain hidden behind thick cosmic dust or crowded star fields at the galaxy's bright core.

Globular clusters like NGC 6723 are among the most ancient structures in our galaxy. What baffles astronomers most is the age of the stars within them. These clusters often contain stars older than 10 billion years, with some dating back almost to the beginning of the universe itself 13.8 billion years ago. They likely formed early in the history of the Milky Way, billions of years before the thin disk of stars where the sun now orbits took shape.

It was once thought that all stars inside a globular cluster formed at the same time, from the same material, during a single burst of star formation. If that were true, the stars would have the same age and chemical composition.

However, Hubble's view demonstrates that this is not the case. The cluster is densely packed at the center, where many bright-blue stars appear concentrated, while orange stars are more prominent toward the edges. Blue stars are younger than orange stars, suggesting that globular clusters can have complex histories, with different populations of stars and subtle chemical differences among them.

Hubble first observed NGC 6723 in visible and near-infrared light as part of a major survey of 65 globular clusters in 2013. It found that massive stars sink toward the center of a cluster, while lower-mass stars drift outward. In 2013 and 2014, Hubble studied NGC 6723 to search for small chemical differences between stars and to measure the spread of ages of stars within the cluster. Two epochs were found, with the second burst of stars happening about 634 million years after the first.

One leading idea is that globular clusters formed when enormous gas clouds collapsed rapidly in the early universe. However, recent simulations also suggest that some globular clusters may be the surviving cores of ancient dwarf galaxies that were stripped of their outer stars by larger galaxies. Either way, they're a fossil remnant hinting at how galaxies evolve.

Globular clusters are not unique to the Milky Way. They are found around many kinds of galaxies, including spirals, giant ellipticals and dwarfs. The Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, is estimated to host about 460 globular clusters, while the giant elliptical galaxy M87 contains roughly 15,000 globular clusters, according to NASA.