The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. (In wider images, it really does look like a flower. See RoryG's recent image.) A long chain of nebulosity appears in very deep images to connect it to the Cone Nebula complex. (See Wolfgang Promper's image here.) This part of the Rosette Nebula is where clouds of dust and gas in front of all the lit-up ionized hydrogen clouds are silhouetted in the light. The clouds are slowly disintegrating in the ultraviolet radiation from the bright stars in the lower center of the image, the stars of cluster NGC 2244. Yet still tiny pockets of the dark stuff remain randomly ahead of the front, globs dust and gas perhaps shrinking under gravity and resisting the radiation scattering the rest of the matter around them.This image is 17x8' with the Atik 16 through the Orion 120mm f/5 achromat, the WO 0.8x II ff/fr (so imaging at f/4), and an Astronomik Ha filter.
2 comments:
So THAT'S what you meant by the Rosette being on everyone's list! This is a beautiful picture. That's my favorite part of the nebula.
Yes, well, it's on my list, too! But I've wanted a better view of the Rosette since I first saw it from the desert south of Reno with binoculars in 1994.
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