User:Kaitlin3farrell/Horsehead nebula

After deciding that the Calupoh article was not the right fit, I began working on the Horsehead Nebula as I find astrology to be thrilling. It was midway of working on this article that I remembered that we are supposed to be working on Ecology based articles and so, I had to ditch my efforts. I will be posting this information to the Article Page and you are more than welcome to add this to my grading schema. I am now working on the Anglo-Arabian!

The Horsehead Nebula (also known as Barnard 33 or B33) is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion.

History

Isaac Roberts, the welsh astronomer who dismissed the location of the Horsehead Nebula

William Herschel, the British astronomer who unofficially observed the Horsehead Nebula

The discovery of the Horsehead Nebula has been a matter of discussion among astronomers for some time. Due to the limited instruments available, it has been challenging to observe.

In 1811, William Herschel, a British astronomer who discovered Uranus, claimed to have seen an object that resembled the Horsehead Nebula through his telescope. However, the reliability of his observation still needs to be debated, as the instruments of that time had difficulty focusing on far objects. In his paper titled, The Construction of the Heavens, Herschel listed 52 nebulous objects he had observed in the night sky throughout his life, one of which might have been the Horsehead Nebula.

Williamina Fleming, the Scottish astronomer who officially observed the Horsehead Nebula

In 1902, a Welsh astronomer named Isaac Roberts attempted to photograph the 52 locations Herschel had mentioned. It took him six years to complete the project and in one of his photographs, he captured the location of the Horsehead Nebula but dismissed it as a large bundle of stars.

Edward Emerson Barnard, the American astronomer who officially catalogued the Horsehead Nebula and allocated its name as Barnard 33

On February 7th, 1988, the Horsehead Nebula was officially discovered by Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming. She captured the image of the nebula at Harvard College Observatory with an 8-inch Bache Doublet, Voigtlander on photographic plate b2312. Fleming's job as a human computer involved photographing stellar spectra and classifying astronomical data. She described the bright nebula around the Horsehead (IC 434) as having a semicircular indentation 5 minutes in diameter 30 minutes south of Zeta Orionis. Although Fleming was the first to capture this beautiful star cloud, she was not credited for the discovery until 1908 when the second Dreyer Index Catalogue was published.

In 1894, American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard captured an image of the Nebula from the Lick Observatory in California. He referred to the Nebula as a dark mass on a nebulous strip extending south from Orionis. In 1919, he labelled the Horsehead Nebula as Barnard 33 (B33) in his catalog, which is known as the Barnard Catalogue of Dark Markings in the Sky. Although he did not discover the Nebula, it was named after him as he was the first to catalog it officially.

Location

Pictured is the constellation Orion, where the Horsehead Nebula resides

The Horsehead Nebula is a cloud of dust and gas located in the Orion constellation, which which is prominent in the winter evening sky in the Northern Hemisphere and the summer evening sky in the Southern Hemisphere. The Nebula is part of the Orion molecular cloud complex and can be observed to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion's Belt. The Horsehead Nebula also lies just south of the bright star Zeta Orionis, the left-hand star in the line of three that form Orion's Belt. The Horsehead Nebula is approximately 422 parsecs or 1,375 light-years from Earth.