SH2-278 (Sharpless 278 ) This fairly good sized object sits just north of Rigel, which is what is causing the bright blue glow in the corner of the image. This nebula has some interesting dark structure to it, which mixes well with the red emission nebula that makes up SH2-278. There is also a fair amount of reflection nebula surrounding the region, so a camera or telescope with a larger field of view should pick up a nice mixture of both types of nebula. However, SH2-278 is somewhat faint, so you will need quite a bit of exposure to obtain a good signal to noise ratio and to produce a clean image. The nebula response to the hydrogen-alpha filter very well, but you will lose the nice blue reflection part unless you take a lot of RGB color data and create some kind of composite to get it back. A larger telescope should pick up some nice structure around the dark rift, and this would be a very good area for a strong high contrast black and white H-Alpha image. This image was published in Astronomy Magazine May 2008. For a complete list of the Sharpless Catalog visit my main site at http://www.sharplesscatalog.com