I found a bright star to follow, where I knew that a nebula lurked. So I set to work exposing my camera and guiding on the star at the top of the Christmas tree cluster in Monoceros the Unicorn (NGC 2264). A few 2-minute shots later (plus all the computer processing of course) I can reveal the image. The flat field image didn’t work too well again, so forgive the brownish blob around the centre. It’s hard to do these on a 20 inch Dobsonian. There are some colourful spikes on the cluster’s stars, some bluish nebulosity to the North and a pinkish nebula to the South. The latter is the Cone nebula. You can see the dark shadowy sector where some dust has got in the way of the nebula and blocked the light from the bright star, preventing the tenuous atomic hydrogen gas from fluorescing at its characteristic red and blue wavelengths.
Sunday 2 January 2011
Cone Nebula
I found a bright star to follow, where I knew that a nebula lurked. So I set to work exposing my camera and guiding on the star at the top of the Christmas tree cluster in Monoceros the Unicorn (NGC 2264). A few 2-minute shots later (plus all the computer processing of course) I can reveal the image. The flat field image didn’t work too well again, so forgive the brownish blob around the centre. It’s hard to do these on a 20 inch Dobsonian. There are some colourful spikes on the cluster’s stars, some bluish nebulosity to the North and a pinkish nebula to the South. The latter is the Cone nebula. You can see the dark shadowy sector where some dust has got in the way of the nebula and blocked the light from the bright star, preventing the tenuous atomic hydrogen gas from fluorescing at its characteristic red and blue wavelengths.
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