A Rising Sun – vdB 70

This reflection nebula in Monoceros is often called the setting sun nebula. But the many days capturing and processing this image gave me time to reflect on that. What comes to mind is the chair George Washington sat in during the constitutional convention in Independence Hall.

As you can see, the chair is embellished by a carving of the sun at the top of the seatback. In a story often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, it was actually James Madison who remarked:

“Whilst the last members were signing it [the Constitution] Doct FRANKLIN looking towards the Presidents Chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have said he, often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.”

Like Madison, in my mind’s eye, vdB 70 is a rising sun representing the progress we have made and have yet to make in this and other fields of human endeavor.

There’s not a tremendous amount of information about this nebula that I could find. Sydney van den Bergh, in his original study of reflection nebulas published in 1966, notes that the star HD 42050, a large blue giant, is the illuminating source—passing its blue color off to some of the surrounding gas and dust.

The distance to HD 42050 (and therefore the nebula) has been catalogued at 830 parsecs (2,700 light years, give or take).