I get a three-dimensional view of the center of the Rosette Nebula, in the lower-left part of this image. There's huge number of stars in that section of the image. At this high resolution crop, you can really get an appreciation for the different variations in the stars. While the shades are subtle, you can pick out the hot blues and cooler yellow stars. Amazing stuff.
This is a close-up crop of my larger Rosette Nebula picture. The larger picture shows some of the "Bok Globules." Those are the small dark blobs in the image They are dense clouds of dust and gas. The interesting thing is that there does not appear to be complete agreement as to what they are, exactly. The consensus seems to be that they are new stars in the process of forming. The other dark nebula tendrils on the upper half of the picture appear to be globules interacting with this energetic environment.
Reference: Located an estimated 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Monoceros, the Rosette Nebula is a spectacular region of ionized hydrogen excavated by the strong stellar winds from hot O- and B-type stars in the center of the young open cluster NGC 2244. It is a region of on-going star formation with an age of about three million years. Some good info about the Rosette is at SEDS here. NGC 2244 and NGC 2237-9,46 Diffuse Nebula NGC 2237-9,46, The Rosette Nebula Open Cluster NGC 2244 (= H VII.2), in Monoceros
Combination of 22x4 minute exposures (88 minutes total exposure). Takahashi TOA 130 (a 5" APO refractor) and Canon EOS D20a. This is resized to be 50% of the original. My current image processing workflow is here. The images from this session feature 29 light frames median combined, along with 9 dark frames. On the darks, I did both a median combine and an average combine, and then averaged those together. Temperature ranged from ~51 degrees F at the start of imaging to 42 degrees when I was packing up and doing my last darks.
12/28-9/2005
Astronomy Pictures: Dick Locke's Astrophoto Gateway page....
The rest of the images from this night...
Dick's Pix (Dick Locke's Picture & Image Page)
hits.