'God's Hand' interstellar cloud reaches for the stars in new Dark Energy Camera image (video)

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has captured an ominous and ghostly hand reaching from the Milky Way from a distant edge-on spiral galaxy. But don't panic; despite its nickname, "God's Hand," there is nothing supernatural about this structure  —  yet that doesn't make it any less awe-inspiring.
God's Hand is actually a cometary globule officially known as CG 4. It is located around 1,300 light-years from Earth within our Milky Way galaxy and seen in the constellation Puppis. Cometary globules are a hard-to-detect subclass of so-called Bok globules, which are isolated and dense clouds of gas and dust surrounded by hot, ionized material.