THE MONKEY'S HEAD NEBULA
- NGC 2174, NGC 2175
- Deepsky 1665mm RGBSHO
- Constellation Orionis

This magnificent nebula is an H-II emission nebula in the constellation Orion, which is about 6400 light years away from Earth. Its size is approximately 40 minutes of arc, which is about the size of the full moon, and has a diameter of 75 light years. It is also known as the Monkey Head Nebula because it resembles the head of a macaque. The emission nebula consists of a cloud of ionized gas (HII - hydrogen) and thus emits light in different colors. The source is photons from one or more nearby stars.
The surrounding open star cluster NGC 2175 has a brightness of about 6.8mag. It consists of approx. 60 stars and is classified as type IV 3 p n according to Trumpler. The object is particularly impressive due to the glow of the very interesting star HD 42088, which has a brightness of 7.55 mag. Its high temperature of almost 40,000 Kelvin and a converted luminosity of 8200 Earth suns is interesting!



The object was discovered on February 6, 1877 by Édouard Stephan, but possibly as early as 1654 by the Italian naturalist Giovanni Battista Hodierna, although this is not certain. For this reason, the German astronomer Karl Christian Bruhns is considered the official discoverer. He discovered the open star cluster in 1857 with a small comet finder. He was a professor of astronomy from 1860 and, among other things, director of the Leipzig Observatory.

Equipment & imaging data:
Telescope: AFIL-1 - AG10 CDK F6.7 f=1665mm (remote telescope, purchased imageset)
Mount: SkyWatcher EQ8RH
Camera: FLI Proline 6303
Lights: R 07x 300s G 10x 300s & B 10x 300s (flats, darks, bias)
Lights: hA 20x 900s S2 56x 900s & O3 24x 900s (flats, darks, bias)
Location: Lijiang, China (Gemini Observatory), 3200m above sea level, Image Data Acquired By Alpha Zhang

Image processing:
mainly Pixinsight, additionally Photoshop, Lightroom, GraXpertAI, BTX Blur Terminator, Noise Terminator, Star X Terminator
Elaboration and development by me, in RGBSHO.