NIGHT OVER ONTARIO

Blue Horsehead

Blue Horsehead Nebula in Scorpius.
Do you see the horse's head? What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper imaging. The main part of the above imaged molecular cloud complex is a reflection nebula cataloged as IC 4592. Reflection nebulas are actually made up of very fine dust that normally appears dark but can look quite blue when reflecting the light of energetic nearby stars. In this case, the source of much of the reflected light is a star at the eye of the horse. That star is part of Nu Scorpii, one of the brighter star systems toward the constellation of the Scorpion Scorpius. A second reflection nebula dubbed IC 4601 is visible surrounding two stars on the upper right of the image center.

Blue Horsehead reflection nebula . Combination of Canon 6d (17x5min) from June 2015 and 160 minutes of Luminance from G2-8300 Moravian CCD in June 2016. All images taken with TS 71 Imaging Star f5 telescope at WhistleStop Obs, Grafton,Ontario by Lynn Hilborn.