Starship Asterisk*

IC 4592: The Blue Horsehead Reflection Nebula

Explanation: 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 here 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 to the right of the image center.

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Blue horses are nice. Nice APOD!

Ann

Nice ....

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Error 404 on clicking the image.

Extra s is breaking link:

nm

It's so rare to see this one north up.

Also a challenge for Ann, try finding it in this image.

starsurfer wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 12:49 pm It's so rare to see this one north up.

Also a challenge for Ann, try finding it in this image.

Haven't figured out how to draw words on pictures, so I'll have to describe:

The bright round cloud at far left surrounds hot runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi. The fainter cloud with "condensations" at upper left contains the Blue Horse. The small round condensation inside the larger faint cloud at upper left is an emission nebula surrounding Pi Sco. The largish blob of emission nebulosity to the left of Pi Sco is an emission nebula surrounding Delta Sco. There is an apparent "gap" in the emission nebulosity to the left of Delta Sco, and in the middle of this gap, we can see Beta Sco. And below and slightly to the left of Beta Sco we can see Nu Sco, which is the blue eye of the Blue Horse.

Ann