Jewels & Secrets in Puppis is the topic of Part #9 of our image presentation, where we want to share the results from our astrophotography-trip to the Hacienda Los Andes in Chile.

In this part we will show you some objects which you can find in the area of the constellation Puppis (Pup). The first image is a wide field image of the constellation itself. Then we take a look at NGC 2467, an extremely active stellar nursery glowing in deep reddish tones in the southern constellation of Puppis. Also globular star clusters like NGC 2298 can be found in Puppis.

CG 4 is a cometary globule in constellation Puppis about 1300 light years from Earth. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails. Globules are frequently the birthplaces of stars, and many show very young stars in their heads. CG 4 seems about to devour the edge-on spiral galaxy ESO 257-19. In reality, this galaxy is more than a hundred million light-years further away, far beyond CG4. vdBH 7 and vdBH 15 are very rarely captured reflection nebulae.

Puppis is well known to be the home of many bright star clusters like M 93, NGC 2477 and NGC 2571. M 93 (also known as NGC 2447) is at a distance of about 3600 light years from Earth. It's brightest stars are blue giants of type B9 with an estimated age of roughly 100 million years. But blue giant stars aren't the only type you'll find here. There are also at least 3 red giant stars as well. NGC 2477 (also known as Caldwell 71) contains about 300 stars, and was discovered by Abbe Lacaille in 1751. The cluster's age has been estimated at about 700 million years.

NGC 2571 is at a distance of about 4500 light years and there are two notorious features in NGC 2571: the cluster contains a high proportion of stars located below the reference line that are serious candidates to be metallic line stars (probably Am-Fm), and shows also a sharp gap along its main sequence that cannot be explained by a random process nor by a biased rejection of cluster members. A striking blue object was detected in the cluster field that could be a white dwarf candidate.