Rosette Nebula (NGC 2238)

It was the end of the night really, and as the Earth rotated, my real target had moved behind the neighboring apartment, but the night was still dark (well, as dark as it gets is Brooklyn, which is not very), so I pointed to the Rosette as a good target for imaging with the narrowband filter from the city. This is only 125 minutes of data, but still not bad.

What I’ve come to realize in only the past year or two is just how dusty the sky is. I mean, on an absolute scale, space is till vacuum and not much there. But the “inky black” of space isn’t quite true. Ignore things like atmospheric sky glow, there’s simply a lot of that thin, hazy dust scattered between the stars, some of which catches a bit of star light so the background is never truly black. What looks like a mottled, incompletely removed background noise is often really just underexposed dust clouds. At f/5 with the narrowband filters, that’s not going to show up except for weak bits that are glowing hydrogen. Imaging this without the filter from a truly dark sight would be interesting.