File:A WISE Infrared Cone Nebula (15943518692).png

English: Here's something very different from my usual work. The other night a discussion at APOD got me looking at the WISE archive and realized there is actually a lot of cool things to be found in there. If you're looking for the cone and having a hard time, don't blame yourself. This is a widefield image and north is rotated 90° clockwise. The cone itself is located in the upper left quadrant just to the left of that bright reddish star.

If you are familiar with this part of the sky then this probably looks quite foreign to you. You might even remember there is a bright star called HD 47887 just above the Cone in visible light images. That star and the bright reddish star in this image are not the same stars. In fact, this bright one is totally hidden from view in visible light but WISE reveals it as one of the strikingly bright stars of this image. There's also an interesting red glow surrounded by another dusty structure in the lower right corner but I'm not sure what's going on there.

These data are from WISE's four color cryo stage and all four bands are included. Redder colors (22 microns) are longer wavelengths and bluer are shorter (3.4 microns). As you can see, many of the stars are visible in shorter wavelengths and the dust glows brightly at longer ones which gives the image its strange colors but typical for WISE imagery.

It wasn't exactly the easiest to job to mosaic together the five required panels for this image. Alignment is not such an issue but between the panels are some major differences in brightness and I'm not sure what the cause is. Whatever the case, keep that in mind if you notice the slight color differences in the background. Some of it may be due to this.

Red: W4 (22 μm) Yellow-Green: W3 (12 μm) Cyan: W2 (4.6 μm) Violet: W1 (3.4 μm)

North is NOT up. It is 90° clockwise from up.