Take a Gorgeous Peak at the Rosette Nebula!
Ah, the Rosetta Nebula or what’s also known as Caldwell 49. This is a true beauty of among the cosmos that’s often showed a lot during romantic holidays like valentines day. This nebula is 5,200 light years distant from Earth and measures in 130 light years in diameter! If you can imagine, the mass of this emission nebula is 10,000 that of our sun! The stars you see surrounding the gas are actually only a few million years old.
The colors you see here are not it’s natural ones but they help scientists understand which elements are present in this gas cloud. The ones highlighted in red are sulfur, green is hydrogen, and the blue is oxygen. There are actually tons of images of the Rosette Nebula taken by Hubble Space telescope and amazing astrophotographers. Here are some of my favorites:
Credit: Brian Lula
Credit: NASA
Credit: Bob Franke
That last one is a close up of the Rosette nebula – just beautiful!
If you search for the Rosette nebula you’ll find even more than this. I hope you enjoyed this and if you want to see this through a telescope I suggest checking out the One Minute Astronomers blog post on it.