IC4592 – The Blue Horsehead Nebula

For my horse-loving friends ❤

IC4592 – The Blue Horsehead Nebula

Captured at Heaven's Mirror Observatory, Australia

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 central part of this imaged molecular cloud complex is a reflection nebula cataloged as IC 4592. Reflection nebulas are fine dust that typically 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 to the right of the image center.

[NASA]

Shots: (10 hours)

• Blue – 20, 300 seconds

• Green – 28, 300 seconds

• Luminescence – 34, 300 seconds

• Red – 34, 300 seconds