NGC 2174 is an H-II emission nebula located in the constellation Orion and is associated with the open star cluster NGC 2175. It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth. The nebula may have formed through hierarchical collapse.
The above text is taken from Wikipedia.
The sharpless designation of The Monkey Nebula is Sh2-252. There is also a faint hint at Barnard 227 a dark region (start between the words "The" and "Monkey" in the image title. Go upwards until you are in line with the word "Scenic" in the left legend). It is very faint so I am not sure it is actually there or if I just imagine it :-)
By "mouse over" on the blue text just below the image you can see:
- HaRGB: Red = 20%R(DSLR) + 80%Ha, Green = G(DSLR), Blue = 85%B(DSLR) + 15%Ha, Lum = 80%Ha + 10%G(DSLR) + 10%B(DSLR)
- H-alpha: Plain Ha from the ML8300
- HaRGB 50% crop: A 50% crop of the HaRGB image centered on the nebula itself.
- H-alpha 50% crop: A 50% crop of the H-apha image centered on the nebula itself.
Click on the underlined image name to load a 50% image.
The colour version have been obtained
by enlargement of the DSLR RGB image and aligning it to the Ha image,
which also involves a crop of the RGB as well as a split into R, G and B
channels. Note that both the DSLR blue and green channel has been
included (together with the Ha image) to form an artificial luminance
image.
The following software has been used. MaximDL (image acquisition and guiding), CCDStack (calibration and RGB scaling, PixInsight (cropping, background correction, colour corrections) and Photoshop CS5 (all the rest, incl Noel Carbonis Astronomy Tools).
This image was processed in January 2011
Copyright: All images © 2011 Matts Sporre. All Rights Reserved