A few degrees north of the famous Rosette Nebula, in the constellation Monoceros, is this beautiful star field in which bluish reflection nebulae seem to play hide and seek with delicate filaments of dark dust. IC 447 is the largest component, top left in the image, and seems to be connected by a long filament to IC 446 below, while NGC 2245 (at right, near center of image) and NGC 2247 (just below) complete the ensemble of reflection nebulae. Embedded in all these clouds are young, massive stars, whose blue light is reflected by the surrounding molecular gas and cosmic dust which glows of the same color.
Also visible in the image are several Herbig-Haro (HH) objects that are usually not picked in in lower resolution images. These peculiar objects are bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars, formed when narrow jets gas expelled by the young stars collide with nearby clouds of dust at several hundred kilometers per second. In this image they look like yellowish knots with HH1196 located under NGC 2245, HH1197 visible below the center of the image, HH1201 found further left and lower in the image, along the same imaginary line connecting the first two objects, and last HH1202 nestled in the top rim of IC446. The faint reddish nebula visible at right in the image is part of the molecular cloud of ionized hydrogen and dust that encloses the Cone and Fox Fur nebulae, both of them just out the field of this beautiful canvas.
Takahashi CCA250 (250/f5) - ZWO 6200MM L (420m) R (60m) G (90m) B (90m) - AMT Observatory (
A.Lau/M.Lorenzi/T.Tse), Río Hurtado, Chile.
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