Today's APOD is a very fine picture, and it becomes jaw-droppingly impressive when you consider the full size of it: 34.07 MB!! I mean!!
I like the colors too, even though I'm often critical of the mapped color of narrow-band images. But in this case, the colors are soft and pleasant, and I like them.
Even so... With my penchant for blue hues, I love the gorgeous blue (really OIII blue-green) arc above great runaway star FN Canis Majoris. But I wish that the star itself had been more obviously blue. So I searched the internet for pictures of of the Seagull Nebula where FN CMa would look both blue and "arc-d", and I found this great image by Stephane Guisard and Thierry Demange:
Seagull Nebula and blue runaway star with arc Guisard and Demange.png
The Seagull Nebula in Hα+RVB with blue "arc-star".
The all-dominant color of emission nebulas like the Seagull Nebula is of course a palette of rosy-red shades of pink from ionized hydrogen. But narrowband images, which typically don't look red or pink at all, bring out interesting details that are really present in the nebulas, but are not very visible at all except in, yes, narrowband imagery.
Yes, but the lovely arc above FN CMa contains just a bit of Hα and lots of OIII with perhaps a bit of blue mixed into it from the star itself.
I highly recommend
this page from Stephane Guisard and Thierry Demange, where you can see an all-Hα version of the Seagull Nebula, and a stunningly beautiful full field portrait of the Seagull floating on the updrafts of the cosmic seas!
Oh, and by the way. I can't resist calling your attention to this lovely portrait of the Seagull Nebula and Thor's Helmet by Martin Konrat in the Recent Submissions thread.
Oh wow. Suddenly we are not on the cosmic seas but in the jungle, where an exotic bird with stunning red plumage takes to its wings to escape the irritating blue insect that is fluttering about, ready to sting.
Finally, maybe the seagull in the Seagull Nebula isn't a seagull but a red parrot?
Ann
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The Seagull Nebula
