The Rosette Nebula
The Rosette Nebula
- Creator: Jerimiah Sorrells
- Date: 2019
- Location: W Broad St between 4th St & 5th St, South Sidewalk, Parking Entrance
- Types: murals (any medium), reproductions (derivative objects), utility box wraps
- Materials: ink, vinyl
- Collection: Traffic Box Wraps
I've been wanting to image this nebula since before I started doing Astrophotography and it all came together for me one fall weekend in the desert. Dark skies, cold temps, awesome company and good running equipment finally lined up! The perfectly named Rosette Nebula is a large spherical hydrogen alpha region located near the end of a giant molecular cloud near the Monoceros region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The blandly named open cluster NGC 2244 is closely associated with the nebulosity that you see here; the stars of the cluster having been formed from the nebula's matter. This is basically a big star nursery that made all of the baby stars you see in the center about 4 million years ago. Ultraviolet light from the hot cluster stars causes the surrounding nebula to glow and the radiation from the young stars excites the atoms in the nebula causing them to emit radiation themselves producing the emission nebula we see. The cluster and nebula lie at a distance of 5,000 light-years from Earth and measure roughly 130 light years in diameter. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be around 10,000 solar masses Total integration time was close to 3.5 hours which means my telescope followed or "tracked" this target thru the sky for three and a half hours taking a series of 5-minute exposures and I used all of the data from those exposures to compile this image.
