This is the Skull and Crossbones nebula, NGC2467 or SH2-311 in the Puppis constellation. I took this image at the Winter Star Party in early February this year. I didn't get much time on the image as the weather didn't cooperate as much as it usually does. I have only five fifteen minute frames for each of HA, OIII and SII giving a little over an hour per channel. I have no RGB so created an HOO image which can look much like RGB and extracted the stars and put them in the SHO image. Based on the image I put together, it's hard to see the skull and crossbones since it is not actually the entire area of nebulosity here, only a small part that is brighter than the rest in the upper top middle. See the annotated image to see the smaller area for NGC2467. Maybe I'll get more time on it in 2025 while in Fla as Puppis hugs the horizon at our latitude. I imaged SH2-311 through an TEC140ED scope with flattener and an ASI6200MM camera and Chroma 3nm narrow band filters on a Mach2 mount unguided using only a sky model.
SH2-311 is a significant star forming region and was the focus of an ongoing Spitzer space telescope study while it was still in operation. The focus of the study was both the brighter area in the upper middle of the nebula as well as the orange Rosette-like shape just left of center. The area has many young stellar objects as well as a couple of emission line stars WRAY 15-101 and CD-26 5105, a couple of Haffner clusters H18A and B and several line of sight star clusters/associations are in the region.
