The very brightest part of this nebula (the knot at the right) is separately classified as NGC 896, because it was the first part of this nebula to be discovered.
The nebula's intense red output and its configuration are driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula's center. This open cluster of stars known as Melotte 15 contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, and many more dim stars that are only a fraction of our Sun's mass. The cluster used to contain a microquasar that was expelled millions of years ago.
This image consists of 59 Ha images all taken at
-10°C at bin 1x1 for 10 minutes each. A total of 9.83 hours Ha data used. All data was
acquired using MaxImDl/CCD version 5.24 using ACP7.1. Pix Insight version 1.8.02.1098 was used for processing. Dithered guiding was on.