The Horsehead Nebula has to be one of the most iconic deep sky objects in existence. The odds are good that if you’ve seen a book about astronomy that it has an image of the Horsehead in it. The Horsehead itself is known as Barnard 33. The large emission nebula is IC 434 and the small reflection nebula is NGC 2023. This has all three basic types of nebula in it, emission, refection and dark.

The nebula is in Orion, near Alnitak which is the easternmost star in Orion’s Belt. The Horsehead is between 1,300 and a,1400 light years away and it and all the surrounding gas and dust in the image is part of the Orion molecular cloud, a vast cloud of gas and dust.

This is 21h 10m of HaRGB data. For all the technical details, see astrobin.

Thank you to the kind folks at AAPOD2 for selecting this as their image of the day on November 13, 2023!