With clear oxygen regions and ominous dark clouds intruding on the bright stars, Jason Dain wins the SkyNews Photo of the Week title for April 8, 2022, with his image of the Rosette Nebula.

Also known as NGC 2237, the Rosette Nebula is located about 5,000 light-years away from Earth. The nebula is a Hydrogen II region in Monoceros, and is closely associated with the star cluster NGC 2244, which lies at its centre.

Using a ZWO ASI2600MM and a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 ED APO (f/5.5), Dain captured 15 hours of data from Stillwater Lake, Nova Scotia.

“I finally got around to processing this HOO rendition of data I captured earlier this winter,” he wrote. “I tried some new processing techniques on this one, and I’m happy with the result.”

Honourable mention

Our honourable mention this week goes to Andrew Lesser’s image of IC 410, the Tadpoles Nebula.

The Tadpoles Nebula is a dusty emission nebula that is about four million years old. The nebula gets its name from the dense streams of dust and gas about 10 light-years long that look like tadpoles, which scientists believe are likely sites of star formation.

Shooting from Calgary, Alberta, Lesser used a ZWO ASI2600MM Pro and a TS-Optics Ritchey-Chrétien eight-inch carbon fibre telescope (f/8) to capture the image. Using Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen III and Sulphur II filters to capture the nebulosity and red-blue-green for the stars, total integration time was 31 hours, 47 minutes and 30 seconds.

“Another lengthy project of mine, this image was created with data captured across 15 nights from early February to late March 2022,” he wrote in his submission. “The skies were so poor during this period that some nights only a few hours could be captured, with at least 25-30 per cent of the data being thrown out due to clouds.”