Cosmic Christmas Tree!

ASTRONOMERS have captured dramatic new images of the Christmas Tree star cluster.
Staff at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which is linked with Warrington’s Daresbury Laboratory through the Science and Technology Facilities Council, have captured a new image which shows the swirling gas around a region known as NGC 2264 – an area of sky that includes the sparkling blue baubles of the Christmas Tree star cluster.
NGC 2264 lies about 2600 light-years from Earth in the obscure constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn, not far from the more familiar figure of Orion, the Hunter. The image shows a region of space about 30 light-years across.
NGC 2264 was first discovered by William Herschel during his great sky surveys in the late 18th century. He first noticed the bright cluster in January 1784 and the brightest part of the visually more elusive smudge of the glowing gas clouds at Christmas nearly two years later.
Stunning images like this and the wonders of astronomy will be the focus of a global celebration next year – the International Year of Astronomy.
With the participation of 140 countries worldwide, and with events taking place nationally, regionally and globally throughout the year, IYA2009 will not only allow people to observe first hand some of the amazing celestial bodies that make up the Universe, but will provide a wide variety of events and projects, from touring astronomy exhibitions to virtual blog interactions with practicing astronomers.
The Christmas Tree star cluster is very bright and can easily be seen with binoculars. With a small telescope (whose lenses will turn the view upside down) the stars resemble the glittering lights on a Christmas tree, say astronomers say.
We at Warrington Worldwide are not quite so sure.
Can readers see a Christmas Tree, either in our picture or with their binoculars?
For the technically minded, the picture of NGC 2264, including the Christmas Tree Cluster, was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI), a specialised astronomical camera attached to the 2.2-metre Max-Planck Society/ESO telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile.
Located nearly 2400 m above sea level, in the mountains of the Atacama Desert, ESO’s La Silla enjoys some of the clearest and darkest skies on the whole planet, making the site ideally suited for studying the farthest depths of the Universe. To make this image, the WFI stared at the cluster for more than ten hours through a series of specialist filters to build up a full colour image of the billowing clouds of fluorescing hydrogen gas.