At the beginning of this year @Chester Hall-Fernandez contacted me to see about doing a collaboration on a target. Shortly after, Chester suggested a change of target to image an area  of nebulosity near the  Carina nebula and close to the star cluster NGC3114, of which there only appeared to be one image that we could find showing the presence of Ha but none demonstrating the interesting structure of the Ha or any OIII component. The imaging was done back in March this year but has taken us a while to get around to posting the images.

As Chester was able to image from a dark sky location, it was decided that he would capture the OIII and I would concentrate on the Ha and collect some exposures for RGB stars.
We decided to process data individually and and so Version A is my process and Version C is Chester's (the reverse is true on his Astrobin account).

We were pleasantly surprised to find some very interesting wavy and filamentous structure to both the Ha and the OIII although processing the data to isolate the nebulosity was somewhat challenging due to the relatively faint OIII signal and the density of the stars in this area.

The other issue was that StarXterminator can have a habit of removing areas of nebulosity (especially fine filamentous detail) and although using a mask can help in this situation, this would also leave behind numerous stars to have to deal with in this particular image. Interestingly, Starnet2 does a better job at leaving the nebulosity in the starless image but leaves behind a lot more artefact to have to deal with.

Two planetary nebula are also present in the image, one of which is PN G284.0-04.7, the red blob at the far right of the nebulosity. The other is PK283-04.1 which was more interesting as it seemed to have spiral arms,  somewhat similar to a spiral galaxy. 


Funnily enough, the open star cluster NGC3114 also appeared to have a somewhat spiral arm arrangement and I have seen one image of this cluster named by the astrophotographer as 'The Spider Cluster' which did seem like an apt name. 

When it came to deciding on a name for our image, Chester thought that this area of Ha and OIII showed an uncanny resemblance to NGC6960, The Witch's Broom Nebula, so  we settled on the name 'The Southern Witch's Broom Nebula' for this image.