Astro Anarchy: An experimental 3D-study of the NGC 2174, the Monkey Head Nebula

Thursday, June 25, 2015

An experimental 3D-study of the NGC 2174, the Monkey Head Nebula

This is an experimental test with a 3D-conversion of my astronomical image. Only real elements from the original image are used, there is nothing added but the volumetric information!

NOTE. This is a personal vision about shapes and volumes, based on some scientific data and an artistic impression.

The original 2D-image of NGC 2175

A blog post about this photo, with technical details, can be seen HERE

Video1 of NGC 2175

This is a looped video, click to start and stop. Original movie is in HD720p resolution.

Video2 of NGC 2175

This is a looped video, click to start and stop. Original movie is in HD720p resolution.

An animated GIF

Info about the technique used

Due to huge distances, real parallax can't be imaged in most of the astronomical objects.

I have developed an experimental technique to convert my astropics to a artificial volumetric models.

My 3-D experiments are a mixture of science and an artistic impression. I collect distance and other information before I do my 3-D conversion. Usually there are known stars, coursing the ionization, so I can place them at right relative distance. If I know a distance to the nebula, I can fine tune distances of the stars so, that right amount of stars are front and behind of the object.

I use a “rule of thumb” method for stars: brighter is closer, but if a real distance is known, I'm using that. Many 3-D shapes can be figured out just by looking carefully the structures in nebula, such as dark nebulae must be at front of the emission nebulae in order to show up etc...

The general structure of many star forming regions is very same, there is a group of young stars, as an open cluster inside of the nebula. The stellar wind from the stars is then blowing the gas away around the cluster and forming a kind of cavitation – or a hole — around it. The pillar-like formations in the nebula must point to a source of stellar wind, for the same reason.

How accurate the final model is, depends how much I have known and guessed right. The motivation to make those 3-D-studies is just to show, that objects in the images are not like paintings on the canvas but really three dimensional objects floating in the three dimensional space. This generally adds a new dimension to my hobby as an astronomical imager.

A screenshot of the 3D-model