This HII emission nebulae is located 5000 light years away in the constellation of Monoceros at a declination of +1 degrees. It spans 35 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 40 light years.
HII-dominated Sharpless objects often appear a bit flat and one dimensional, but this object has nice texture due to the dust clouds and associated pillars, most of which appear to be pointing at the brightest blue magnitude 6.3 star HD 47432. This star has a slight blue reflection nebula halo. I usually post my images north up, but this object looked better to my eyes in this orientation, where north is to the right.
This nebula lies midway between the larger Sharpless objects Sh2-280 and Sh2-284, about 3 degrees south of the Rosette Nebula. The lower right corner shows the edge of
Sh2-280. The small Sharpless object Sh2-283 is seen just to the left of Sh2-282. With less exposure, this small HII region would look like a HII-dominated planetary nebula.
As shown in the mouseover, the open star cluster NGC 2262 is seen just above and left of the nebula. This 4 arc-minute diameter cluster is magnitude 11 and has the Trumpler designation of I2p, indicating that it is a small concentrated cluster with a medium range of star brightness. At a distance of 12,000 light years, this cluster is much further away than the nebula.
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Reminder – This object and 3100 more are included in the
Imm Deep Sky Compendium, a free planning resource to help astrophotographers find interesting targets in their night sky. Foreign language translations in Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, and Chinese are now available at the link above.
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