ASTRO: NGC 2170, NGC 2182 and GN 06.05.7.02

NGC 2170 is a mostly reflection nebula in Monoceros. It is the nebula
at the upper right. To its left is GN 06.05.7.02 and in the upper left
corner is NGC 2182. All are part of the Monoceros R2 region of massive
star formation. Dust and gas both reflecting light (blue) and emitting
light from ionized hydrogen (red) are seen in the image along with dark
nebula. These are regions where the dust and gas are too dense to emit
light nor can starlight from stars behind it penetrate the dust and gas.
This leaves what appears to be dark rifts in space. Nothing a giant
space vacuum cleaner couldn't deal with but the dust is so fine even the
best hepa filter would fail to hold in the particles so they'd come out
of the vacuum as fast as it sucked them up of such a vacuum were
possible. The cloud is thought to be about 2,400 to 2,700 light-years
distant, twice the distance to the nearby Orion Nebula and its large
star forming region. In a few thousand years most of the dust and gas
will have either been turned into stars or blown away by the high
energies of its most massive stars and the shock waves of the deaths as
super nova explosions. Then only an open star cluster will remain where
we now see this huge tangle of dust and gas of many colors.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=5x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick
--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net