SUNSET: 
0
Photographer:
Hal Heaton
Location of Photo:
Chilescope Tel 4
Date/Time of photo:
2026 February 11, 13-15
Equipment:
Telescope: Nikkor 100 mm aperture, f/2; Camera: FLI Microline 16200 CCD (unguided, unbinned, 180-sec exposures); Mount: 10Micron GM1000 HPS; Filters: Astrodon Gen 2 (R, G, B, Ha)
Description:
The southern Milky Way's gamma Velorum cluster features bright blue and complimentary orange stars intermixed with reddish clouds of H-alpha emission that lie just west of the Vela supernova remnant. It contains hundreds of young low mass stars, but its most prominent member is one of the 50 brightest naked-eye stars in the sky. Appearing toward the upper left in this image, it is a multiple-star system comprising a 9 solar mass Wolf-Rayet star (gamma2 Vel) and a 30 solar mass O7.5 giant that are situated 7.7 deg below the Galactic plane at a distance of about 1100 light years. Each of those stars is itself a spectroscopic binary. The small cluster of bluish stars (NGC 2547) to the lower left of center it is not associated with the main cluster and is merely passing through that region.
