HOMEPAGE

Adjusting your Monitor

My work for ESA/Hubble

Voyager Photo LibraryBETA

Deep-Sky CatalogueNEW!

Awards and Publications

About Me

Links

Contact

Stay tuned with SkyFactory.org! What is it?

Buy photo prints of these images

The origin of the mysterious cone-shaped region seen on the center remains a mystery. The interstellar formation, dubbed the Cone Nebula, is located about 2700 light years away. Other features in the image include red emission from diffuse interstellar hydrogen, wispy filaments of dark dust, and bright star S Monocerotis. Blue reflection nebulae surround the brighter stars visible on the center. The dark Cone Nebula region clearly contains much dust which blocks light from the emission nebula and open cluster NGC 2264 behind it. One hypothesis holds that the Cone Nebula is formed by wind particles from an energetic source blowing past the Bok Globule at the head of the cone.
(Text adapted from Astronomy Picture of the Day)

Remarkable features Click the image to view and interact with the hi-res image. NGC2264 is an open cluster with a nebula associated, 20'x20' large, magnitude 3.90, with a surface brightness of 10.15. NGC2259 is a little open cluster, 5.0' in diameter, magnitude 11. NGC2254 is an open cluster, 6.0' large, magnitude 10.90. NGC2245 is a reflection nebula, 5.0' large. The magnitude of the associated star is 10.5. LBN899 is a large nebula, 30.0'x15.0' large. LBN922 is a large nebula, 180'x60' large, that surround the Cone Nebula. OCL494 is a rich open cluster, 15.0' in diameter, magnitude 10.90. 16 Monocerotis is young star, visual magnitude 5.93. 17 Monocerotis is a red star, the brightest of this field, its magnitude is 4.77, so is barely visible to the naked eye.   Find Chart The position of Cone Nebula complex (in the red circle) in Monoceros. Image from Cartes du Ciel.

In order to produce the color image seen here, I worked with data coming from 2 different photographic plates taken at Palomar Observatory between 1989 and 1992. The original file is 16,840x16,870 pixels with a resolution of about 1 arcsec per pixel. The image show an area of sky large 4.7° x 4.7° (for comparison, the full-Moon is about 0.5° in diameter).
Copyright: Davide De Martin.

Other images of the same celestial field found online

• http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020503.html by ACS Science & Engineering Team, NASA;
• http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020107.html by Robert Gendler;

This image is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two type of glass photographic plates - one sensitive to red light and the other to blue light and later they were digitized. Credit: Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Digitized Sky Survey.