This image shows the region of west center Monoceros where it meets the southeastern corner of Orion. The main object in this area, which as can be seen from the constellation boundaries, was imaged as it rose in the early evening so the camera, horizontal with the eastern horizon, is oriented so that north is to the upper left, is NGC 2301. This and the other five objects are all open clusters as we would expect for the winter Milky Way. The locations of two of them, as plotted in Orion's TheSky™ planetarium software, are somewhat off and which therefore necessitated some research into their exact whereabouts. NGC 2250 and NGC 2232 are the clusters that didn't quite match the locations in the planetarium software. Unannotated image. |