By Gontran Eleizalde | 2024-03-16
![Community photo entitled by Ernest Jacobs on 02/20/2024 at Eden, NY , USA](https://earthsky.org/upl/gravity_forms/6-d184048789a60d766a02a8e43117298b/2024/03/NGC2237-Final-pi3-02202024.png)
On 02/20/2024 10:00 pm by Ernest Jacobs| Eden, NY , USA
The Rosette Nebula is a large emission nebula that surrounds an open star cluster in the Constellation of Monoceros about 130 light years in diameter. The Rosette is about 5,500 light years from Earth. The massive stellar winds from the young, hot stars in the cluster have carved out the central hole (about 30 light ears in diameter) and sculpt the structure in the nebula. This is an area of active star formation. There are several NGC objects within the area, the entire object is typically designated as NGC 2237.
Although there is anentirely separate object known as the Skull Nebula, this object can be oriented so that it appears as a skull. Do you see the skull? Was hoping to get more imaging time to this but weather, personal commitments, and Eclipse outreach with our astronomy club have prevented that from happening. Maybe next year.
Telescope: Explore Scientific ED80 Essential Series Air-Spaced Triplet Refractor
Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro
Filter: Optolong L-eXtreme
Mount: Sky-Watcher USA EQ6-R Pro
Exposure: 44 exposures at 180 sec / Gain 100 / Offset 50 / -10 deg C each.
All pre and post processing was performed in PixInsight. WBPP, DBE, BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator, HT, StarXTerminator, Narrowband Normalization, CT (multiple iterations for increasing brightness, contrast, & Saturation), SCNR, LHE, Unsharp Mask, MMT, & DSE.
This was a very challenging image to process as the very bright (Moon) was in the constellation Gemini. This was too close to the target and resulted in a horrible Gradient in the image. Thankfully we have some pretty amazing tools to deal with Gradients. I found DBE provided the best result.