Credit: ESA/Cover Images A ghostly figure has been caught swooping through the night sky just in time for Halloween. Astronomers have spotted what looks uncannily like a giant bat flying across the cosmos. The eerie sight was captured over the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Paranal site in Chile by the Very Large Telescope’s Survey Telescope (VST). With its ultra-wide view, the powerful instrument revealed a massive cloud of glowing gas and dust that bears an astonishing resemblance to a bat mid-flight. Floating some 10,000 light-years away between the southern constellations Circinus and Norma, the so-called Cosmic Bat stretches across an area of sky equivalent to four full Moons. It even appears to be lunging towards a glowing patch of light above — as if hunting for prey. But this spooky space creature isn’t out for blood — it’s a stellar nursery, where new stars are being born. Inside the nebula, infant stars pour out energy, heating up the surrounding hydrogen gas until it shines a vivid red. The darker tendrils weaving through the cloud form what looks like the bat’s skeleton — cold, dense filaments of gas and dust that block out starlight from behind. The hauntingly beautiful wings belong to two star-forming regions known as RCW 94 and RCW 95, which make up the right wing and body of the creature. Other parts of the bat remain unnamed. Captured with the VST, a telescope run by Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics and hosted at ESO’s desert observatory, the image showcases the telescope’s remarkable power. Its 268-megapixel OmegaCAM camera can capture enormous swathes of sky in breathtaking detail — perfect for spotting cosmic ghosts like this one. To create the final image, astronomers combined data from several filters that reveal light at different wavelengths. The red glow of the bat comes from visible light data gathered for the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge, while infrared details were added using ESO’s VISTA telescope — painting the darker regions of the nebula with even more eerie beauty.