The Monkey Head Nebula, categorised as NGC 2174 (in NGC Catalogue) is an HII emission nebula located in the constellation Orion and is associated with the open star cluster.
The nebula may have formed through hierarchical collapse. An interstellar cloud of gas will remain in balance as long as the kinetic energy of the gas pressure is in balance with the potential energy of the internal gravitational force. i.e the movement of the gas in the cloud, offsets the pull of gravity to collapse the cloud.
During a massive cloud collapse dozens to tens of thousands of stars form more or less simultaneously which is observable in star clusters. The end product of a core collapse is an open cluster of stars, which then start to drift away from the cloud.
This is sometimes known as a stellar nursery nebula.
It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth, which means that this light left the nebula at the time that Abraham was alive, it travelled through space at the speed of light, until last week when we caught it on the sensor of our camera.
Dedicated to my dear Joshua, for he is my little monkey.
This nebula is super tricky to get all the detail out. The Oxygen in the centre of the nebula is being ionised by the central star which is creates the light blue colour in the central region. The hydrogen gas is glowing red all around the nebula, also due to ionisation by the stars in the nursery.
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| BiColour Ha and Oiii Natural Template |
This first capture was a test capture of just HA and Oiii, of only a hour, notice how much more detail and colour there is in the first image, this is after adding on an extra 6 hours of data, including about an hour of light in the normal spectrum of RGB.