Monkey Head NGC 2174

 So last night I was just searching around and stumbled on this gem of a nebula, perfect composition for my light train and enough of a light emitter that it only took two hours of exposure. Trouble is I did not start on this until midnight... I ended up with 234 sub-exposures (lights) and 153 keepers of them were keepers. I thought I would be able to keep more than 63% but oh well.

So NGC 2174 the Monkey Head Nebula is shining through a star cluster, NGC 2175 which crowds the nebula with a lot of stars. I had to be careful not to over crowd the nebula and still be authentic to the massive star count. The nebula is thought to be 6,400 light years from my telescope. BTW I have no idea how they came up with monkey head (well if you go sideways maybe just maybe)...