Recently, I shared
an image I took of the Seagull Nebula with a wide-field camera lens. Now I've zoomed in on the seagull's head, a region named RCW 2, or Gum 1! The nebula is located in the constellation Monoceros, which is east of Orion.
The whole Seagull Nebula is an HII region, or a giant cloud of hydrogen gas where stars are frequently born. Here in this portion of the nebula, there is also a dense lane of light-absorbing molecular dust -- a dark nebula. The star in the center, HD 53367, is probably what is shaping and energizing the gas in the region.
It took me a few attempts to combine my luminance, color, and narrowband data in a way that I liked -- I finally wound up enhancing the RGB data with the Ha and OIII (although there is very little OIII here), enhancing the luminance with Ha, and then adjusting the settings in PixInsight's LRGBCombination process to yield a better result than its default settings. But overall, considering how much light pollution I'm shooting through, not too shabby!
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