馬頭形狀的反射星雲IC 4592

Horse Head Shaped Reflection Nebula IC 4592

影像版權與提供: Jim Misti and Steve Mazlin, (acquisition), Robert Gendler
(processing)

Explanation:
Do you see the horse's head? What you are seeing is not the famous
Horsehead nebula toward Orion but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on
a familiar form with deeper imaging. The main part of the above imaged
molecular cloud complex is a reflection nebula cataloged as IC 4592.
Reflection nebulas are actually made up of very fine dust that normally
appears dark but can look quite blue when reflecting the light of energetic
nearby stars. In this case, the source of much of the reflected light is a
star at the eye of the horse. That star is part of Nu Scorpii, one of the
brighter star systems toward the constellation of Scorpius. A second
reflection nebula dubbed IC 4601 is visible surrounding two stars on the far
right.

說明:
你看到馬頭了嗎？ 你看見的不是獵戶座著名的馬頭星雲，而是一個相當暗的星雲，只有在長時間曝光的深空影像裡，熟悉的馬頭形狀才會顯現出來。
影像中這個分子雲氣團的主體，是一個編號為IC 4592的反射星雲。
反射星雲是由微細的塵埃所組成，通常看起是黝黑的，不過在反射附近熱星的星光後卻會顯得很藍。 在這個範例中，大部份的反射星光是來自位在馬眼的恆星。
這顆星是尾宿九 (Nu Scorpii)的一員；它是天蠍座數個明亮多星系統之一。 在影像的右上角落，可以看見夾在二顆恆星中間稱為IC
4601的第二個反射星雲。

資料來源：Scientific American
　　　　　Department of Physics, NCKU