This is one of the first amazing pictures taken through a telescope partly funded by a consortium involving the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan).

This 'first light' image shows the Trifid Nebula, a stellar nursery, thousands of light years from Earth where new stars are actually being born.

It was taken in the first trial of the new £300,000 digital camera on the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) and landed on the desktop of astronomers at the uni this week.

The £11 million telescope, one of the largest in the world, has taken five years to build and is located in Sutherland, near Cape Town, South Africa. It was built by partners in six countries, including a UK consortium involving the university.

Professor Gordon Bromage, head of the university's Centre for Astrophysics and chairman of the UK SALT Consortium, said: "The declaration of first light signifies that SALT has arrived on the astronomical scene.

"No longer will it be necessary for astronomers to travel to South Africa to use it.

"Instead they will submit their observing requests and receive the resulting data over the internet." The completion of this project will give UCLan's astronomers and students access to world-leading facilities and enable them to see deeper into the universe than ever before.

Other images projected directly to the Preston university include star clusters about 15,000 light years from Earth, created 10-12 billion years ago.

The university's senior astronomy lecturer, Stewart Eyres, said: "SALT science programmes will vary from studies of the most distant and faint galaxies to observations of asteroids and comets in our own solar system."

Scientists working on the telescope, said that while the imaging quality is not yet at its final optimal value, the sheer light gathering power of the telescope is amply demonstrated in the trial images.