This image captures many beautiful and fascinating objects in the southern constellation of Corona Australis (The Southern Crown), just over 400 light-years away from earth. I have included an annotated image to assist with understanding the description below.

The dark nebula is Bernes 157, is one of the dustiest, darkest nebulae in the sky. The dust clouds block many of the more distant background stars in the Milky Way. This object is tough for many of us to image because of its low summer sky declination of -37 degrees.

At the center of the image are the two wonderful, detailed blue reflection nebulae (NGC 6726 and 6727), separated by 1 arc-minute. The nebulae are powered by 2 young stars shrouded in gas and dust, likely having protoplanetary disks.

Above and to the right is the white, comet-like variable reflection nebula is NGC 6729. Like Hubble's Variable Nebula, this object consists of dark clouds obscuring the light of a bright star, in this case the star R Coronae Australis. This variable star can change in brightness almost 4 magnitude due to the moving cloud shadows, with observable changes in as short of a time as 24 hours. I have included a comparison of this object between images that I took over 2 years apart. The images were taking with the same mount, camera and filters but with a different refractor of the same focal length. I see some minor changes in this object over that time, but nothing dramatic.

The structure of a Herbig Halo object (HH100) is seen just to the left of NGC 6729. Another HH object (HH101) is visible nearby, with a strong HII emission. Many other HH objects have been identified in this immediate area through infrared and other means, but they are not visible in this image.

In the the upper left of the image IC 4812, the bright blue nebulosity illuminated by a double star of magnitudes 6.4 and 6.7. These two stars have a separation of just over 10 arc-seconds.

Finally, the spectacular globular cluster NGC 6723 is seen at the lower left. This colorful cluster has a magnitude of 6.4 and a diameter of 10 arc-minutes. It is much further away than the nebula complex, at a distance of 30,000 light years.