NGC 2174 (The Monkey Head Nebula) is an HII emission nebula above the star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. It lies within our Milky Way Galaxy, approximately 6,400 light years from Earth. This low-density cloud is an active region of star formation. Young stars emit ultraviolet light, which ionizes the hydrogen gas making the nebula glow.

This image is our first light image from our 4 Telescope Array, a unique setup comprising four Officina Stellare RH300 telescopes on an Officina Stellare polar fork mount. The robust mount includes a custom bracket system, allowing each of the four telescopes to be precisely pointed at the same location in space. Last year we had great success photographing wide field targets with one RH300 telescope. Placing four telescopes on one mount quadruples our productivity, allowing us to accumulate four times the data each night in our short imaging season.

The array is controlled with a custom version of Voyager, astrophotography system control software developed by our Italy-based friend Leonardo Orazi. Leo developed a server-client system, allowing us to control all four imaging systems through one window. 

The image was shot by the SC Observatory team (Mike Selby, Stefan Schmidt, Andy Chatman) from our Samphran, Thailand based observatory. 477 exposures totalling more than 37 hours were processed in PixInsight and Photoshop. Narrowband Hydrogen Alpha, Oxygen 3 and Sulfur 2 were mapped to Red, Green and Blue channels respectively. RGB images were captured for accurate star colors.