NASA Releases Stunning Image of Christmas Tree Cluster NGC 2264

• NASA has released a stunning image of the star cluster NGC 2264
• It is known as the Christmas Tree Cluster
• This star cluster is 2180 light-years away from Earth

Christmas Day is long behind us, but the Christmas tree is still honorably decorated in the living room. Someone may no longer enjoy looking at it and thinks that next year they would like to buy a smaller one so that there is not so much work to be done with it. Or, on the contrary, bigger, more spectacular.

In any case, probably none compares to the one whose photo was published by NASA just in time for the Christmas holidays. Scientists have processed several images of the open star cluster NGC 2264, also known as the Christmas Tree Cluster, using appropriate colors and angles to create the beautiful composition you can see in the cover image above.

Composition of images from different places

If the photo alone isn’t enough for you, NASA has also released an animation on its website in which the young stars, pictured as white and blue lights, twinkle like Christmas tree lights. To be precise, the age of these stars varies between one and five million years, so they are about a thousand times younger than our Sun. Some of them are also several times lighter than our nearest star. These stars emit X-rays, and that’s what the Chandra X-ray Observatory, operating in Earth’s orbit, detected.

Optical data of the gas in the nebula, in turn, was captured by the Kitt Peak National Observatory using the WIYN telescope, boasting a diameter of almost one meter. We would find this in the Quinlan Mountains in Arizona, USA.

WIYN Telescope on Kitt Peak

Let’s not forget the foreground and background stars, the infrared data showing these stars in white was made available to NASA thanks to the 2MASS project, which stands for Two Micron All-Sky Survey. It took place about twenty years ago and was one of the most ambitious surveys of the entire sky in the infrared spectrum.

Getting it right works wonders

Finally, the entire composition was rotated 160 degrees clockwise so that the tip of the tree was at the top of the frame. Astronomers usually photograph with north pointing up, as in the image of the same star cluster taken by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The star cluster NGC 2264, or the Christmas Tree cluster, in an ESA image

NASA also recently used data from Chandra to create an image of a ghostly ghost hand, and the X-ray telescope continues to be an important tool in astronomers’ quests in space. The latest image of the Christmas star cluster is just the latest of the telescope’s achievements and once again shows how beautiful the universe can be.

Author of the article

Matyáš Hřebík

Enthusiast for mobile phones, smart home and artificial intelligence. In my free time, I like to swim, ride a bike, ski or create websites.

2023-12-27 19:30:00
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