The Anatomy of a Stellar Nursery

The Anatomy of a Stellar Nursery

Introducing the Rosette Nebula / Stellar Nursery When I first started to image stellar nurseries, I really didn’t know anything about them.  I was told that stars are being born there – that is pretty awesome, but I was curious what was it about these light generating molecular clouds (MCs) that made them prolific star builders.   Sure, stars are also created in turbulent dark molecular clouds, but stellar nurseries really churn out the stars at a much higher level – often creating whole open clusters of stars.   Many of the stellar nurseries get very large and can even be mapped from their Halpha light signal in other galaxies.   Ok, so my interest was piqued – I had to figure out