At this time of year, Christmas trees abound: Real trees, artificial tress, small trees, big trees, scraggly trees, fat and full trees … And while trees for home use rarely top six feet, other trees are stories tall. The famous Christmas tree at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan is usually between 75 and 100 feet tall, and requires more than 30,000 energy-efficient LED bulbs to light. But even that tree has nothing on the “Christmas tree” in the night sky.
NGC 2264 is the New General Catalogue designation number for two deep sky astronomical objects: the Cone Nebula, a cloud of space gas shaped like either an ice cream cone or a pine tree, depending on how you look at it, and the Christmas Tree Cluster, a tightly–bunched cluster of about 40 bright blue stars in a vaguely triangular shape, causing them to resemble lights on a Christmas tree.
You can spot these in the winter constellation Monoceros, the unicorn. They are located about 2600 light-years from Earth.
Both objects were first catalogued by astronomer William Herschel on two separate occasions. The cluster made it into his 1784 catalogue. It wasn’t until the day after Christmas in 1785 that Herschel saw the nebula near the cluster’s brightest star. Both objects were conspicuously absent from the famous deep sky object catalogue created by Charles Messier and his assistant Pierre Méchain, first published in the 1771.
The very bright Christmas Tree Cluster is easy to spot with a naked eye, as long as the sky is dark enough. The nebula requires binoculars or a telescope to see.
Jaime McLeod is the Web Content Editor for the Farmers' Almanac. She is a longtime journalist who has written for a wide variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including MTV.com. She enjoys the outdoors, loves eating organic food, and is interested in all aspects of natural wellness.
If you notice a hole in the upper left-hand corner of your Farmers' Almanac, don't return it to the store! That hole isn't a defect; it's a part of history. Starting with the first edition of the Farmers' Almanac in 1818, readers used to nail holes into the corners to hang it up in their homes, barns, and outhouses (to provide both reading material and toilet paper). In 1910, the Almanac's publishers began pre-drilling holes in the corners to make it even easier for readers to keep all of that invaluable information (and paper) handy.
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