The Rosette Nebula [click on the image to see it 2x]

The Rosetta Nebula is a vast cloud of dust and gas, extending over an area of more than 1 degree across, or about 5 times the area covered by the full moon. Within the nebula, open star cluster NGC 2244 is situated, consisted of the young stars which recently formed from the nebula's material, and the brightest of which make the nebula shine by exciting its atoms to emit radiation. Star formation is still in progress in this vast cloud of interstellar matter.

Although various values for its distance occur in the literature, our adopted distance from the Sky Catalog 2000 implies a true diameter of the nebula of about 130 light years.

Open cluster NGC 2244 was discovered by Flamsteed about 1690.

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Camera: Moravian G4 (16803 ccd)
Filter(s): Astrodon Gen II RGB
Scope: AP155 F7 w 4" FF
Exposure: 8x20 minutes h-alpha, 15/16/15x10 min each of RGB
Lucknow, Ontario, Canada
March 2025

RGB processed in PixInsight then Photoshop
PixInsight: CombineChannels, SPCC, StarX, BlurX on the starless image, Curves, HistogramTransformation on the Starless and StarsONLY images separately, maksed Saturation Boost. on the StarsONLY image, Stars-back-in.
Photoshop: Square Crop, background noise reduction, save-for-web

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