This HII region, the 205th object in the Sharpless catalogue, is located 3300 light years away in the constellation of Camelopardalis at a declination of +53 degrees. It spans 2 degrees in our apparent view. This corresponds to a width of about 100 light years.
The main portions of this nebula are believed to be excited by the 2 stars shown in the mouseover, HD 24431 and HD 24094. Looking carefully, you can see rough spherical outlines of the nebula around these 2 stars, although clearly there are many other things going on here as well.
I have also labelled NGC 1444 on the mouseover, a magnitude 6.6 open cluster of about 30 stars located further away (4000 light years) and believed to be unrelated to Sh2-205.
I centered the image on the most interesting part of this nebula, but as a result the framing is a bit disappointing as it doesn't quite capture the whole nebula. It would have been convenient is the nebula was oriented east-west instead of north-south. I didn't want to mess up all of my RASA tilt corrections by changing orientation for this object.
Dr. Stewart Sharpless published his first “Catalogue of HII regions” in 1953. His updated second and final list, known as Sh-2, was published in 1959. The Sh-2 list includes 313 objects north of declination −40°. My Astrobin Sharpless collection is
here.
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