The Christmas Tree Cluster & The Cone Nebula
Two in one
First things first, the image:
The Cone Nebula & The Christmas Tree Cluster
The Christmas Tree Nebula is a large cloud of gas and dust located about 2,300 light-years away from Earth in the Monoceros constellation. It gets its name from its resemblance to a Christmas tree, thanks to a dark dust lane running through its center. In the image above, it’s the larger triangular shape. This nebula spans about 30 light-years in diameter. The brighter blue section in the middle is an area of star formation which is actively creating stars that light up the surrounding gas clouds.
The Cone Nebula is found just above the star-forming region in the Christmas Tree Nebula at the top this image. It contains protostars—little baby stars still in the early stages of development. The Cone Nebula gets its shape from intense radiation emitted from the stars that are being formed at the tip of the cone.
The Image
This image was taken over three nights in April. I was battling cloudy and rainy weather, and a limited window of visibility before the target disappeared behind a tree in my backyard, so I only had a few hours each night that I could capture data. I also had to throw out a couple 10 minute exposures because of airplanes flying through the frame. After all that, the final image is made up of 26 exposures of 10 minutes each for a total of 4 hours and 20 minutes of exposure time. I was really hoping to get more time to get more of the detail and pull out some of the noise in the image, but cloudy skies have prevailed for quite a while and now it’s no longer visible from my backyard.
This image is a false color image (like my Rosette Nebula image). I used a narrowband filter to cut out light pollution, so the original processed image was primarily red from the hydrogen alpha gas that makes up a good chunk of the nebulae in these objects:
What’s Up Next
Clouds, clouds, clouds. I’ve had very limited opportunities to shoot with mostly cloudy weather recently, but I have a few new types of objects I’ve been able to capture. Big groupings of stars called…star clusters. I’ve also managed to catch the end of this year’s hotly anticipated galaxy season. I hope you enjoyed the image and stay tuned!
-Kristian
The final image one more time:
