version 030222
New stars are forming from the compressed gas, in numerous pillars ("Elephant trunks").
An excellent example of a pillar lies in the middle of this stereoscopic image.
The pillars line up with the cluster stars. The new star is inside the head of the pillar and can be detected with xrays, which penetrate dust. They are invisible here.
Travis Rector describes how he and others obtained the original flat image They used the Mosaic CCD Camera, on the Kitt Peak 0.9 meter telescope, with selective filters to gas emission lines, assembling several exposures.
John Wattie made the stereoscopic version by image processing. This is less than a quarter of the original Holmes stereo card, as shown here
For those who do not have a Pokescope or Wheatstone stereoscope for parallel eye computer 3D viewing, here are links to other versions:
Anaglyph medium, whole picture
Small U stereo whole
X or cross-eye stereo whole
X Big version SW corner
(The full size colour 3D version of this stereoscopic Holmes card is only available on application to the author because of NOAO copyright.)
OC NGC 2244 open cluster is embedded in the nebula: RA 6h 31.06m, Dec 5° 2.89' (Feb. 2003)
Find the nebula just over half way between Bellatrix (Left hand star of Orion) and Procyon.
Although it is big, twice the moon diameter, it is very faint and needs at least dark sky and night glasses, maybe a nebula filter too, but then only shows as a faint fluff around the star cluster.The cluster formed from the nebula and is currently blowing the gas away to make "the hole in the donut".
New stars are forming from the compressed gas, in numerous pillars ("Elephant trunks").
The pillars line up with the cluster stars. The new star is inside the head of the pillar and can be detected with infra-red and xrays, which penetrate dust. They are invisible here.The stereoscopic creation is based on the idea that anything obscuring something else must lie in front of it. The cluster stars must be in the donut hole in order to blow the gas away. Catalogues available to the author do not give the distances to the stars, so they are assigned arbitrary depths.
The nebula is about 5000 light years away and about 100 light years across (Park & Sung (2002, AJ, 123, 892). A beautiful wide field photograph by Naoyuki Kurita shows a lot of fainter nebulosity in the vicinity of the Rosette. The brighter Christmas Tree cluster is one 5 degree binocular field away to the NE (25 degrees position angle). Individual nebulosities are probably part of a huge molecular cloud in this region of Orion / Monoceros.
http://nzphoto.tripod.com/stereo/
