An image captured by the OmegaCAM instrument mounted on ESO’s VST in Chile shows details of the nebula cataloged as Sh2-284. It’s part of the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), a survey that included over 500 million objects in the Milky Way to improve our understanding of stars’ life cycles. Sh2-284 is a sort of star nursery whose shape was compared to that of a cat’s face and for this nicknamed “smiling cat”.