Hubble Time! The last one of 2022! 🌌 NGC 6530 is a collection of several thousand stars lying around 4350 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The cluster is set within the larger Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctly smokey appearance; clouds of interstellar gas and dust stretch from one side of this image to the other. Astronomers scoured NGC 6530 in the hope of finding new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula. This makes understanding their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments challenging. 📸 @europeanspaceagency / @hubbleesa & @NASA , @esoastronomy, O. De Marco; @creativecommons CC BY 4.0 Acknowledgement: @ozsaracdrmh #Hubble #Nebula #NGC6530 #LagoonNebula #Sagittarius