Sharpless 228 is also known as LBN 784. It contains a known infrared star cluster. Since I can't take images in infrared light it doesn't show in my shot. It is hidden by the dust of the nebula. What we do see in my shot is the ionized hydrogen on its surface caused to glow by super hot ultraviolet emitting stars that have escaped the confines of the nebula and are now causing the hydrogen on its surface to glow the characteristic pink color of ionized hydrogen. Sharpless 228 appears to be about 11,500 light-years away so is not a nearby object. An IR image of the cluster can be seen at:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/ps/0309/0309196v1.aa0009f2.jpg
With careful comparison you can match the stars in my image to the IR shot as the orientation, north up, is the same and the image scale is rather similar as well.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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SH2-235 is considered to be caused by the collision of two vast molecular clouds. The collision has triggered a great amount of star formation that is only seen in deep dust-penetrating infrared light. I've seen it called the "Brain Nebula". It is about 1800 light-years away by some estimates. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996ApJ...463..630H&link_type=ARTICLE&db_key=AST&high=
The faint H alpha seen in the upper left corner is a very small part of SH2-232. Even fainter tendrils from SH2-231 can be seen coming in from the right. They, along with SH2-233 way off to the right of my image are all part of the same complex per the cited paper.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' RGB=3x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for SH2-235SH2-235, | 
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Sharpless 239 is a mostly reflection/dark nebula with several Herbig-Haro objects embedded in it -- the pink spots. It also contains a mystery I've not been able to solve. Notice the three near star-like points in a triangle in its center. The POSS 1 and 2 plates show only two. The one at the lower left is missing! I've tried to find out about it but so far with no luck. My first thought was a variable star though I couldn't find any listed for its position. Checking what few images of this object exist on the net I find all modern ones show the star-like object but those dating to the time of the POSS plates don't. I contacted an astronomer in Hawaii that was supposed to be an expert and was told it was on his narrow band image (great shot with a 2.5 meter scope) but he provided no date. Since it wasn't a "new" object he wasn't interested and told me that it was worthless to compare narrow-band images to the POSS plates, totally ignoring the fact my shot wasn't narrow-band! I wrote him back asking why it wasn't allowed to compare wide-band red images to red POSS plates and got no reply. Maybe my email didn't get through his filters. My original email was relayed by another astronomer who I didn't bother to relay my reply. Thus he will remain nameless here. It appears that sometime between the POSS plates and today this object has come out of the murky depths of the nebula for us to see. Though in doing so it didn't change the nebula much that I can see. I do see a slight brightening in this area on the POSS 2 plates so it may have just started to appear about that time. Or maybe it is a variable star everyone since has caught at near maximum. I just don't know.
Rather than type away as to what an HH (Herbig-Haro) object is I'll just refer to this link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbig-Haro_object
They aren't necessarily pink (pink is due to ionized hydrogen gas) and in fact, the other two star-like objects carry HH designations and the "new" one may be another that is now showing as blocking dust moved out of our line of sight. I wanted to see it in IR light but couldn't find any images. I'd hoped to find some by Spitzer. If anyone knows of any let me know.
For a color image of this object made from the POSS plates (without my mystery object) see:
http://galaxymap.org/cgi-bin/details.py?id=21557&t=hii&s=4_p31.5xp30.5&name=S239
I found no solid distance estimate for this object but if it is associated with the same dust cloud as T Tauri - which appears quite possible then it is a bit under 600 light years from us.
After I posted this image Adriano, an imager I've exchanged posts with, made a movie using the POSS I and II images (both blue and red combined) and my image (color). It shows the star-like object coming out of the merk but to our surprise, it shows something else. The HH objects (not the star-like object) are moving! The movie covers from the mid 50's to about 2008 when my image was taken so covers about 50 years.
One explanation as to why they move is this is a light echo. Off-screen, to the northeast, a supernova apparently blue some time in the past. Its UV light is hitting the H2 in the HH objects. I'm mostly seeing the H alpha as does the red POSS plates he used. The light of the supernova is traveling through space illuminating a piece of the HH objects but not all of them. As the light hits across the HH regions like a series of flashbulbs different parts are illuminated. Several pros I contacted say this is likely. But the movement covers 50 years of time. The entire nebula isn't that big let alone these tiny HH objects. I wrote back asking how an echo would need 50 years to move such a short distance? I got some answers but I'm still lost. To me that UV source has to be constant over 50 years, not a flash bulb and the HH objects really moving. Pros don't agree. Maybe a reader can figure it out.
I was having issues with a strong red gradient and didn't have the tools back in 2008 to deal with that. Thus the nebula is likely redder than it appears in my image. I need to retake it as I found the source of the red gradient years ago and eliminated it. Since Adriano's movie uses my poor color image I haven't reprocessed it either.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x10' R=2x10'x3, GB=3x10'X3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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Sh2-241 is an emission nebula in southern Auriga just below vdB65. I found several distance estimates. All put it over 15,000 light-years distant. The only one with error bars says 17,000 light-years +/- 3500 light-years. In any case, it is at least 4 times further away than its neighbor, vdB 65.
Again I was fighting severe clouds that hampered my image. I used the best data from 2 nights to try and piece it together, some were taken the same night as vdB65 but while I had good conditions for some of the vdB65 image conditions had gone downhill by the time I moved to Sh2-242. H alpha came from the second night, most of the color and luminance from the first.
SIMBAD identifies the brightest part of the nebula around the star as the reflection nebula GN 06.00.9. That appears completely overtaken by the emission nebula. The blue data for the brightest part of the nebula is a bit bluer than normal for an emission nebula but not by a great deal. Maybe it is my poor conditions that prevent me from seeing it all that well. The faint part of the nebula is also known as LBN 825. It is also listed as LBN 824 a reflection nebula. Though again I can't see the blue color I'd expect for a reflection nebula. To the west of the fainter portion is an odd yellow-orange object. It is listed as LEDA 135933. NED shows it as a galaxy but under classification say HII. I suppose this means it is a galaxy with strong HII emission. It is listed as being 400 million light-years distant. It is the only galaxy with a redshift measurement at NED in my field. There's a star just about on top of the galaxies core. In the 1" per pixel image, it does show as two separate objects if you look closely. The bright one being a field star.
With so little to annotate I wasn't going to do an annotated image but then noticed 5 asteroids I'd overlooked so did prepare one to point these out. All Green data was taken the second night (several days later) so green is missing from the brighter asteroid trails.
After processing, I noted it partly overlapped the vdB65 image though was offset to the west somewhat. I didn't realize then when processing and posting vdB 65. I did combine both into a mosaic at 1.5" per pixel and cropped the blank regions that this created. Since conditions were a bit better for much of the vdB65 image the frames were a nightmare to match. Not being a mosaic expert this is the best I could come up with.
Data for the Sh2-241 image:
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10', Ha=3x30', RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for SH2-241SH2-241, | 
SH2-241L4X10HA3X30RGB2X10.JPG
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SH2-242 resembles, to my eye, a fish swimming to the left. The body is LBN 826 while the mouth, set off by a curving dark lane appears to be LBN 827. I'm no expert on these but it's the best I can determine. Most images of this object are done in narrowband which loses the reflection nebula around the probable illuminating star. It is a B0V star. It is located about 7200 light-years away in the northeast corner of Taurus. Thanks to the Tower of babble I imaged this under the LBN designations not realizing it was also on my to-do list as SH2-242. In fact, years later when I was putting this website together did my brain finally click. Fortunately, the SH2-242 designation hadn't yet been imaged so for once I didn't waste time retaking something.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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Sh2-247 in Gemini was imaged back in January. It was so faint my usual 2x10' color data was unusable. Even the luminosity frames were worthless but the 3 30 minute H alpha frames held usable but faint data. I need to try for color data using more and longer subframes but that will have to wait. For now, this will have to do.
Sky Map's section on Sharpless objects has this to say about it.
According to a 1989 study, Sh 2-247 is part of the Gem OB1 association, contains 37 thousand solar masses of gas and dust at a distance of 2200 pc, and appears to be physically connected through CO filaments with Sh 2-252. It is ionised by the B0 III giant LS V +21 27.
Avedisova agrees on the ionising star but gives a larger distance estimate of 3500 +/- 800 parsecs. She places Sh 2-247 in the complex star formation region SFR 188.93+0.79 with 51 components, including 9 masers, several infrared star clusters, at least 4 molecular clouds, and the young stellar object IRAS 06058+2138.
Now you know as much as I do about it. For the parsec challenged one pc equals 3.26 light years so the first estimate puts it at about 7200 light years while the second is saying 11,400 +/- 2600 light years. Since no error bar is given for the first estimate I can't tell if they overlap or not.
14" LX200R @ f/10, Ha=3x30', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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Sh2-261 also known as Lower's Nebula is an HII region probably illuminated by the O7.5 runaway star HD 41997. That is the bright blue star toward the top center of my image just above the brightest part of the nebula. I found distance estimates to the nebula ranging from 1000 to 3000 parsecs distant. If the closer is right it is part of the Orion arm of our galaxy. If the more distant ones are correct it is part of the Gemini OB1 complex. The Sky lists the Hipparcos data as showing the star to be 909 parsecs distant making it part of the Orion arm and not the Gemini OB1 complex quite a few papers seem to show it. Sounds like more work needs to be done on this one.
The nebula gets the name Lower's Nebula as it was photographed by an amateur father and son team (Harold and son Charles Lower) in 1939 with their 8" f/1 Schmidt camera they'd constructed a few years earlier.
The nebula is a huge squashed ring several times larger than my field of view. I just selected the brighter part of the bottom of the ring. It is best seen in H alpha light but it contains some reflection components around the illuminating star that I wanted to pick up so I used LRGB imaging without any H alpha added. Unfortunately, conditions were rather poor for this image with high clouds creating a glow around the brighter stars that I only sort of eliminated. It also reduced my ability to pick up the fainter parts of the nebula without more noise than I'd normally tolerate. Probably another for the reshoot list that probably won't happen.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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Sh2-269 also known as LBN 876 is a small star-forming region in northern Orion just east of the top of his club. It is thought to be ionized by the B0.5V star in its western (right) half. Just which star that is I've not determined. A second similar star is so buried in the nebula it is seen only in IR and likely also helps to ionize parts of the cloud. Its distance is thought to be about 12,400 light-years. A recent paper says 13,200 but has error bars that put it somewhere from 11,600 to 15,300 light-years. This was based on parallax measurements radio masers in the nebula. The problem is they have their own motion about the star cluster that is forming in the cluster which makes determining their radio parallax difficult hence the large error bars.
There's a nasty B1V star at 1370 light-years just east of the nebula. It created a huge blue circle running right through the nebula about where the dark lane runs. My usual technique is to take a similar blue star, remove the stars then subtract that star from the one in the image. That sort of worked but if I totally removed the artifact I damaged the nebula as well. I think I finally found a compromise that got rid of most of it and left the nebula alone. Bright blue stars and Schmidt Cassegrain corrector plates don't play well together.
Most images of Sharpless objects are done narrowband. I took this in LRGB without any narrowband. I suppose NB would have eliminated the issue with the B1V star but otherwise seems to add little to this object.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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SH2-274 also known as the Medusa Nebula and Abell 21. Young planetary nebulae are small and usually blue but old ones are huge and red. The size is related to age since these are shells of gas puffed off when a red giant star runs out of fuel and the core collapses. The intense heat generated by the collapsing core pushes the outer envelope of the star away faster than its escape velocity so the gasses just keep going making an ever larger shell about the star. Eventually, these gasses run into the interstellar medium. When the star was still "alive" it blew a hole in the interstellar gases making a nice hole for itself. But when it died at became a white dwarf (actually they are so hot they are blue so the name is rather wrong) it could no longer keep the hydrogen and other gasses between the stars away and it slowly starts to fill in the "hole". At the same time the shell it blew off expands until it hits the more slowly moving incoming gases. The collision usually glows red. The color of HII emission caused by this collision. In this case, the bubble has hit the interstellar medium first on the left side. The right side as only hit a small amount of material so the bubble looks unsymmetrical. Since the blue "white" dwarf is pretty much in the center we know either the gasses blown off were less toward the right or they haven't yet made contact to any extent. The latter appears to be the case. As the planetary ages, the white dwarf cools and no longer has the energy to cause the gasses to glow on its own. In this case, some blue can still be seen mixed with the red indicating it is just barely able to excite the bubble to glow. The cooling of the star plus the increasing size of the bubble has reduced the radiation hitting the bubble to the point most of the glow is coming from the collision with interstellar gases. The "white" dwarf still shows strongly blue in color indicated it is still quite hot and it is mostly distance that has limited its ability to light up the nebula rather than its temperature. Seeing was lousy the night I took this image, much as it usually is this time of the year. Another for the reshoot list that never happens.
14" LX200r @ f/10, L=4X10' RGB=2X10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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Sh2-282 is an emission nebula excited by HD 47432, an O9 star which is the bright star that gave me fits in the upper left of the image. It seems to be surrounded by a faint bubble or maybe just an arc of HII emission. I thought it part of the horrid reflection it gave me but it is real. Galaxy map puts it about 5000 light years distant one place and another says it is about 4000 light years away. Take your pick. I can't fit it all into my frame so picked the more interesting, to me at least, part to include. Galaxy map says it contains 8 cometary globules. What I see are lots of dense shock fronts all pointing right to the exciting star.
This is an HaLRGB image. HA was added to the luminosity data using the lighten mode. It was added at 80% to the red image, 10% to the green and 20% blue also using lighten mode. Stars were removed from the H alpha image before the blend so are pure LRGB. The image is noisy. I needed considerable more H alpha time. If I find time to get more I'll rework it. This data is from last January.
Due to the noise and lack of fine detail, I've reduced this one to 1.5" per pixel. It fits monitors better at this size as well.
14" LX200R @ f/10, Ha=3x30' L=4x10' RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
SH2-282HA3X30L4X10RGB2X10X3r1.jpg
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