I spent Friday night at the River Ridge Observatory shooting a few objects. I had two rigs going, three counting the stationary DSLR doing star trails. The long night allowed me to break it into three imaging sessions and the last one was dedicated to one object with two rigs – the Rosette Nebula in the constellation of Monoceros (the Unicorn).
The Rosette Nebula is a large cloud of energized hydrogen, an HII region we call it. It’s about a degree across, or about twice the apparent width of the Moon. Stars are forming inside it now. Click on each thumbnail for a larger view.
Here is a image of the region at low power – 135mm. Note the ring of red nebulosity in the upper left quadrant.
Compare that to this snippet from Stellarium. The small green squares represent emission nebula and match the ring seen in the upper image. And the green squares at the bottom match the red area at the bottom of the previous image.
Finally, a closeup of the Rosette taken at 539mm focal length.
