There's a lot more going on underneath the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud than I ever realized: Emission nebulas, reflection nebulas, spritely objects from a past supernova, and dark dust clouds. Normally, I would try to reduce the impact of stars on an image, but here I did my best to allow the star players to shine through. I did want to show all these other interesting objects in their full glory, but the stars are the thing here. And I think one can get an even greater sense of that from the RGB overlay image I've added here. Shades of Dave Bowman.
As an homage to the insanely talented
@Bray Falls, who discovered this formation last year, I cropped out the Sprites of M24 and processed that portion in HOO right here. This image below isn't nearly as detailed as what Bray has produced, but it's a larger field than his high-resolution image (
The Oiii Sprites of M24 - High Resolution Follow Up) and perhaps shows more of the incredible extent of their influence.
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