Rosette Nebula
What is Rosette Nebula?
Nebulae· Distance 5,200 ly. A rose 130 light-years across blooming in Monoceros beside Orion. The young stars of the central cluster NGC 2244 have blown out the middle like a flower's heart, and the surrounding hydrogen forms red petals. The cluster shows in binoculars.
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bearing · altitude · rise time · best time tonight
Where Rosette Nebula is in your sky right now: https://nowsky.org/solar/sky?sel=rosette nebula — location and time set automatically, no login.
Its place in the sky
A nebula, in the direction of Monoceros, spanning about 80 arcminutes of sky — 2.6 times the width of the full Moon.
Distance and scale
| Distance | ~5,200 ly |
|---|---|
| Size | ~130 ly across |
| Type | emission nebula + open cluster |
| Constellation | Monoceros |
Figures are representative approximations. Source: compiled from NASA and IAU public data.
Discovery and name
Winds from the central cluster NGC 2244 carved the rose; Flamsteed found the cluster in 1690.
Frequently asked
- How far is Rosette Nebula from Earth?
- ~5,200 ly.
- What kind of object is Rosette Nebula?
- emission nebula + open cluster.
- Where in the sky is Rosette Nebula?
- In the direction of Monoceros.
- Where is Rosette Nebula in the sky right now?
- Open the sky view for your location and time and it shows the position in the sky right now.
One rose, four catalogue numbers
The Rosette appears in the NGC catalogue not once but several times: NGC 2237, 2238, 2239 and 2246, each a bright patch discovered separately by nineteenth-century observers and numbered on its own, with the central cluster as NGC 2244 under yet another number. Telescopes of the day could not show so large a nebula as one body. Today it fits in a single photograph, but the numbers remain, and sources variously call the Rosette NGC 2237 or list several.
Such duplication is common in nebula catalogues. The eye sees only the bright knots; photography joins the faint stretches between them. In the Rosette's case the pieces were recognised as one nebula only after photographs in the 1880s. The plurality of numbers is itself a trace of astronomy's passage from looking at nebulae to photographing them.
The nebula in depth
The Rosette Nebula is a huge emission nebula about 5,200 light-years away in Monoceros, roughly 130 light-years across. On the sky it spans a little over two full Moons, but its rose-red petals of gas only show properly in photographs. Catalogues split it into several numbers — NGC 2237, 2238, 2239 and 2246.
At its center lies the open cluster NGC 2244, about four million years old. The winds and radiation of its hot O-type stars have swept the surrounding gas into a cavity tens of light-years wide, and its rim folds like overlapping petals. Elephant-trunk pillars and globules dot the nebula, still forming new stars, and some ten thousand solar masses of gas remain.
In the Sky view, look east of Betelgeuse near the head of Monoceros on winter evenings. The cluster NGC 2244 shines at magnitude 4.8 and is easy in binoculars, but the nebula needs a dark sky and a wide-field telescope with a hydrogen-alpha or UHC filter to show a faint ring. For astrophotographers it is a signature target of the winter sky.
Related
Figures are representative approximations. Simulated positions use J2000 mean elements.