New NASA Spitzer telescope image: The Magic Dragon

Our astronomer friends at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab have just released a new picture from the Spitzer telescope. The Spitzer infrared view is on the top, and the visible-light view is shown on the bottom.

"The flying dragon can only be seen with infrared," Whitney Clavin of JPL tells Boing Boing, "It's a dark, dense cloud where stars are just beginning to form. In fact, the dragon will eventually metamorphose into a bright star-forming cloud like the one to the left of the dragon."

More info, and larger sizes of this image, on the JPL website.