The skies stayed clear at 11 PM last night and I grabbed 300 thirty second images of the Monkey Head Nebula. The NGC 2174 nebula has a very particular shape and has been nicknamed "monkey head" precisely because it shows the vague appearance of a monkey's head seen in profile. In reality this celestial object, which is located about 6400 light years from us, is an area of star formation, a cloud of gas - mainly hydrogen - and dust within which there are some young, very bright stars. It is precisely their ultraviolet radiation that illuminates the nebula, ionizing the hydrogen of which it is composed and thus giving it that typical reddish color.
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