For my non-astronomer friends, all you need to know is that MUSE is a special type of instrument called an Integral Field Unit (IFU) spectrograph.

It effectively takes an image of the sky, but every pixel in that image is also a spectrum. It's three dimensional data (recording two of space and one of wavelength), enabling one to map the kinematics of stars and gas in a galaxy, obtain spatially resolved spectral diagnostic maps, etc.



For my astronomer friends, you need only know two things: