Photo of the Week for January 20, 2017
Situated among the showy constellations of winter (and just east of Orion, the showiest of them all) is the dim figure of Monoceros, the celestial unicorn. Monoceros is hardly eye-catching, but within its borders are several splendid deep-sky objects. Arguably the finest of them is the Rosette Nebula. While detecting the large, dim nebula requires a fairly dark rural sky (perhaps with the help of a narrow-band nebula filter), the associated cluster at its centre (NGC2244) can be viewed in binoculars. But it’s only through photographs, like this one by Raphaël Dubuc, of Saint-Georges-de-Windsor, Québec, that the Rosette reveals its true splendour.
Raphaël acquired 90-minutes total exposure at ISO 800 with a Canon EOS Rebel T3i DSLR camera equipped with a Astrodon IR/UV cut filter and attached to a Sky-Watcher Equinox 80mm f/6.25 apochromatic refractor telescope to produce this fine image.
