So what's with the extra "ee" in "Tulipee" in my title? 

Yes, this is the Tulip nebula, more properly known as Sh2-101, the 101st entry in the catalogue of HII regions published by Stewart Sharpless in 1959, enlarging upon an earlier catalogue that he produced in 1953 (@Gary Imm  has a nice compilation of Sharpless objects north of Dec -27). I've framed the field with a horizontal flip relative to a more conventional orientation (which in this case would be close to PA=0), since I think that the image feels more "kinetic" this way, with the bluish OIII-region in particular seeming to flare out more dramatically, and giving a sense that it has been pushing a loose petal off to the upper left. Incidentally, Sharpless also gave a list of stars that he identified as responsible for the ionization of the HII regions in his catalogue, and in the case of the Tulip, he identified one, the O-type star HD227081, which here is immediately to the right of a sharp shock front, which together look remarkably like the gynoecium of a flower containing a single ovule (or am I just showing how little I know about flowers?!).

But the reason for that extra "ee" relates to a personal trip down memory lane. Back when my son Alexandre (now a grown man of 28 years) was in Pre-K, I would frequently pick him up for the afternoon trip home, taking a bus and then walking the final few blocks. We always passed by an apartment building with a bed of flowers, and when they bloomed quite dramatically that spring, Alexandre would ask every day if we could stop so that he could smell the "Tulipees". Our family has referred to the flower that way in all the years that have followed and, somewhat amazingly, he has worked for the past few years at a company that prominently features "Tulip" in its name! I only became aware of the Tulip nebula this past spring, which immediately became object #1 for imaging in the summer. It then took me an excruciatingly long time to figure out how to process the thing, but at last, I am finally posting it, as a gift for my son.



My image of the Tulip Nebula is the result of about 8.5 hours of integrated exposure time in Ha and 12 hours in OIII, along with about 2 hours in each of the R, G, and B filters, in order to add-in the stars; the data were taken over the course of 12 nights from the end of June through to the middle of July. My OIII data was quite noisy, and I initially found it very challenging to fold that in with the strong Ha, without significantly diminishing the OIII features (assigned to the G and B channels) or draining them of colour, or adding too much noise to the dimmer regions of the field. But a strong mask that restricted the OIII blending to its higher-signal strength regions finally did the trick, after first applying HDRMultiscaleTransform to the Ha, and later making use of the "c" channel in CurvesTransformation to help bring back the colour after I had finished stretching the lightness. The plate scale is about 0.62"/pixel, downsampled by 75% from my system's native resolution by 75%.