GUYS
...How often do I get to do that twice in the same week?? But indeed, yes, narrowband filters win the day!
This is my favorite target, the Rosette Nebula, near and dear to me, with a new look through my new Optolong L-eXtreme filter. This filter is a duo-band narrowband filter, which means that it's a filter built for color cameras that primarily passes hydrogen-alpha and oxygen-III light, like my monochrome filters do. Basically, it allows me to cut through light pollution on nebula-type targets that emit a lot of this light. Huzzah for modern technology!
The Rosette Nebula is a huge star-forming region in the constellation Monoceros, which is next door to Orion in the wintertime Milky Way. The cluster of hot, young stars at the center, which were born here, are both energizing the gas to glow and carving out the hole in the middle. Overall, this stellar nursery is home to some 2,500 newborn stars. The Rosette lies about 5,200 lightyears from Earth, and is 130 lightyears.
One thing I love about this object is the amount of small details in it. All over the place are fingers and blobs of dark molecular dust, absorbing starlight and appearing dark against the nebula. In some places, the glowing gas clouds are shaped by the stellar winds of young stars into intricate patterns. There is something to see anywhere you look!
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