The Rosette Nebula
C49 / NGC 2244 • Star-forming emission nebula • Monoceros • 5200 light-years from Earth
🔭
Askar FRA400
📷
ZWO 2600MC Pro
🌃
Bortle 8
⏱️
15 hours
🗓️
February 2021
Overview
The Rosette Nebula is a vast emission nebula in the constellation Monoceros, shaped by intense stellar winds from a young central star cluster only a few million years old. These energetic stars have blown a large cavity, creating the distinctive hollowed out appearance at the heart of the nebula. The Rosette is also catalogued as Caldwell 49, while the central cluster itself is known as NGC 2244, whose radiation continues to sculpt the surrounding clouds of gas.
Background
This was a fun target to image because there’s so much detail to bring out. It’s tricky to get the colours looking nice during processing though. This particular version is an August 2025 reprocess of the original data.
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Explore the field
Objects in this field 15 objects
15 objects
No matching objects.
- Rosette ClusterNGC 2244
- Cluster + nebulaAlso catalogued as NGC 2239 · C 50 · Ced 76b
- Rosette NebulaNGC 2237
- NebulaAlso catalogued as Sh2-275 · LBN 949
- NGC 2238
- HII regionAlso catalogued as C 49 · LBN 948 · Ced 76a
- NGC 2246
- Nebula
- NGC 2252
- Open clusterAlso catalogued as Cr 102
- Cr 97
- Open cluster
- RMC-4b
- Open cluster
- 12 Mon
- StarAlso catalogued as HR 2382 · HD 46241 · HIP 31159
- K0V
- RMC-5
- Open cluster
- RMC-4a
- Open cluster
- LDN 1625
- Dark nebula
- FSR 1032
- Open cluster
- LBN 943
- HII region
- LBN 941
- HII region
- Rosette Eye
- Star
About the labels and credits
Positions and outlines are calculated from a plate solution of this photograph. Outlines are catalogue guides and may not follow every visible filament. Additional catalogue objects may be faint or indistinct in this exposure.
Plate solving and annotation data: SkySolver, by Dominik Sito. Stars: Gaia DR3 and Hipparcos (ESA). Deep-sky data: OpenNGC © Mattia Verga (CC BY-SA 4.0), SIMBAD and VizieR (CDS). Names: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and IAU WGSN. Catalogue overlay adaptations, including styling and selected display names, are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Photograph © Lee Pullen.
Kit list
This is the equipment I used to capture the image.
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Telescope: Askar FRA400
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Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC Pro
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Guidescope: William Optics 32mm Slide-Base Uniguide
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Guidecam: ZWO ASI 120MM Mini
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Control: ASIAIR Plus
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Filter: Optolong L-eXtreme
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Example source data
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