[AZ-Observing] Re: NGC 2024 - The Flame Nebula
- From: Brian Skiff <bas@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 03 Feb 2019 12:05:56 -0700
On Sun, 2019-02-03 at 11:46 -0700, Bernard Miller wrote:
Hi,
This is an image of NGC 2024, also known as the Flame Nebula. It is an
emission nebula 1,500 light years away in the constellation Orion. The
nebula is ionized by the bright star Alnitak, which is just off the FOV at
the bottom of the image and is responsible for the bluish glow at the
bottom. The dark network that appears throughout the nebula is cause by gas
and dust in front of the nebula obscuring the central part. This nebula is
part of the Orion Molecular cloud and lies just northeast of the great Orion
Nebula.
A question that sometimes comes up is what star fluoresces
this nebula. The usual answer is it's the brightest star shown in
Bernard's image along the bottom edge of the large dark rift.
(The image is rotated 90 degrees from 'sky-right', so that
north-right and east-up.) The star, about V mag 12.2, was
identified in the early 1960s as a much-obscured B0 star,
hot enough to excite the gas.
The GAIA2 catalogue records this star at a distance of
about 327 parsecs = 1060 light-years with reasonably small
uncertainties (about +/- 50 light-years).
\Brian
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