The Horsehead Nebula (also known as Barnard 33) is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion's Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. It appears within the southern region of the dense dust cloud known as Lynds 1630, along the edge of the much larger, active star-forming H II region called IC 434.
The Horsehead Nebula is approximately 422 parsecs or 1,375 light-years from Earth. It is one of the most identifiable nebulae because of its resemblance to a horse's head.
The nebula was first recorded in 1888 by Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming on a photographic plate taken at the Harvard College Observatory. One of the first descriptions was made by E. E. Barnard, describing it as: "Dark mass, diam. 4′, on nebulous strip extending south from ζ Orionis", cataloguing the dark nebula as Barnard 33.
The above images is made up of 6 subframes 5 minutes each (30 minutes) stacked and processed in AstroArt 7 and tweaked using Photoshop 5. The subframes were captured using a AT6RC scope mounted on an AP900 mount with a Starlight Express SXVR-M25C. The AP900 was autoguided using a Meade DSI Pro camera and an 80mm f7 refractor scope. The image data was captured while at Rusty's RV Ranch near Rodeo, AZ in October of 2020.
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