The famous "Rosette Nebula" in Monoceros. Visible only as a faint, ghostly gray circle through even the largest telescopes, it reveals its brilliant colors with exposures of a few minutes or longer. It is located about halfway along a line from Procyon to the belt of Orion. Note the glittering open star cluster NGC2244 in the center of the nebula. These are hot, young stars formed from the same hydrogen gas cloud that formed the nebula. The high-energy UV photons emitted by these stars tear electrons from the hydrogen atoms comprising the nebula. The free electrons quickly reconnect with ionized hydrogen nuclei and emit photons as they cascade down from one energy orbit to the next. These photons produce different colors based on their wavelength, and produce the colors that we see.
This image was taken over several nights. Total exposure time was 26 hours, the longest image I have ever taken or processed, all from the Deep Sky West observatory in New Mexico where my former imaging telescope is located.
This is a false color image using the so-called “Hubble Palette” of sulfur ii, oxygen iii, and hydrogen alpha filters. While the colors are false, they are useful, and often used by the Hubble Space Telescope, because they yield detail not observed using true color.
February 2017
Location Taken:Deep Sky West Observatory, New Mexico
Conditions of Location: Equipment Used:Takahashi FSQ-106 apochromatic refractor, Paramount ME mount, SBIG STL11000 CCD camera, Astrodon LRGB filters.
Processing Used:30 mins x 20 sulfur ii 30 mins x 16 oxygen iii 30 mins x 16 hydrogen alpha total exposure time of 26 hours
Distance from Location:5200 light years
Constellation:Monoceros (the "unicorn")
Other Link:
This is a beautiful picture! Thank you for sharing your passion and patient work with us; especially in helping us understand how complex these nebula are, and how unique they are too. Thank you, also, for putting in layman terms the makeup of this nebula.
I stumbled upon your work a couple of years ago and was blown away by the beauty in the heavens. It just takes my breath away and instills a deep fear and awe of our God. And now reading about this newly discovered galaxy, -DF2 which has no dark matter in it and is stumping astronomers because it is defying all the current theories, sends a thrill through me at how God is revealing that He will not be put into a system, rule, laws etc. but is outside of them and makes them.
Also, it brings to mind how heaven is light and there is no darkness in it. Perhaps this is a glimpse of that truth.
Website is awesome.
Beautiful!!!!! As author Margaret Feinberg would say, “I’m wonder struck at the awesomeness of God!!!”