Later in 2021 I started messing around with the concept of these “deepscape” images – pairing deep space objects with terrestrial foregrounds, all shot at the same focal length.  At the beginning of 2022 I posted an image of the Rosette nebula rising behind Cerulean Knob in the Smokies – obviously very early days into my deep space exploration.  What I learned as I was shooting and processing the Rosette nebula, is that it is “connected to” (at least from our vantage point) a string of other nebulosity, and the interplay between all of that stuff was really interesting to me.  I decided then that 300mm was too tight to fit it all in with a foreground, so this past fall I decided to reshoot the whole scene at 100mm instead, which is the image you see here.  This is the exact same mountain and segment of the sky, shot “zoomed out” a bit to 100mm as I mentioned, and about thirty minutes later to allow the objects to rise high enough in the sky for them to be visible.

Rosette is the very blueish object up and right from the prominent peaks.   Down and right from it is a nebula known simply as Sh2-280 (most nebulae have boring names like this haha).  Working right of Rosette nebula is the cone nebula, the Christmas tree nebula (the tree is upside down from our view here in the northern hemisphere, to help your imagination out a bit.  It has a faint blue-ish white cloud going through the top of it), and then some other structures up and further left that have a very strong blue color to them that I don’t know what is called.  As I’ve stared at it, it looks like Rosette is pulling from the nebulae on the left (or vise versa), but in reality, its one giant series of dust clouds, all being illuminated by neighboring stars.  For reference, and to help with scale, the full moon would fit inside the darker center of the Rosette nebula at this focal length.  One more reference for scale, if you look at last week’s image, down and left from the Orion constellation, you’ll see today’s complex hiding behind the tree (it’s mixed up in the tree limbs, but look for the red).  That image, by comparison, was captured at 24mm.

As with the others, if you scroll down, I have included an annotated version so you can see all the stars and constellations!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson