This was a fun target to revisit! The first time I imaged the Pacman nebula, it was with my SVX102T (714mm) and a 12.49mm x 9.99mm camera, so I completely missed out on the fact that there are some pretty interesting objects in the nearby vicinity, which can be seen in this wider field image.

I’ve highlighted these with zoomed in overlays, with the inset images unedited (just stacked and stretched). You can see three groups of objects and when I noticed they weren’t annotated in Stellarium, I headed over to SIMBAD and found out the following:

1.       The upper left collection of objects (indicated with blue markers) includes a dark nebula (DOBASHI 3729), a Maser (Onsala 3) and a bunch of radio sources. I’m surprised this collection isn’t given a name, since it really looks like the Pacman is heading to eat it, just like the Pac-Dots/pellets/cookies from the game! So I’ll informally name it the “Pac-dot nebula” since it’s a shame for it to be nameless .

2.       The yellow markers show a reflection nebula: [RK68] 5. I originally thought this was just star diffraction, but then noticed the central star isn’t even as bright as its neighbors.

3.       The objects designated with red markers are particularly interesting to me: according to SIMBAD (coord 00 58 46.37 +56 28 20.7 (FK5, 2000, 2000), radius: 2 arcmin), there are IR sources [FT96] 123.9-6.4 and [FT96] 123.9-6.4A on/near the star that sits between the two “lobes” marked in red. Curiously enough, the two lobes aren’t identified in SIMBAD (save for a star in the left lobe: [G84d] 2-1). I wonder if there’s some sort of lensing going on here, as it’s curious that a) these lobes funky colored (and in a different way than the green halos around my stars; maybe some IR playing weird with my cheap Zwo filters?) and b) they’re pretty symmetric around the central IR sources.

If anyone knows more about these objects, please do enlighten me!

Addendum: The folks over at cloudynights pointed me to Aladin, which led to this paper which describes this area as a molecular cloud. Specifically, they call this "Molecular cloud A" associated with NGC 281 and go on to say (quote):
"The 12CO and 13CO composite spectra, centered on IRAS 00557+5612 [aka. [FT96] 123.9-6.4A], are presented in Fig. 5. The line profiles are non-Gaussian in this region, and the mean velocities vary from VLSR=−28 km s−1 to −31 km s−1, over an angular distance of 8′, indicating a notable outflow—a contour map of this outflow is shown in Fig. 6. In addition, we detect a peak brightness temperature of 0.7 K in CS (J=2−1) from this position. The CS spectrum shows an asymmetric line profile (see Fig. 7). We obtained a linewidth of ΔV=1.95 km s−1. These facts strongly imply that the IRAS point source is an embedded protostar, which provides a direct heating source for Cloud A."

So looks like a star formation region illuminated by a protostar!