Gum1, informally known as the Head of the Seagull, is an interesting region with lots of nebulosity. The Gum is an emission nebula that extends across 36 degrees in the southern constellations Vela and Puppis. It contains about 32 cometary globules. These dense cloud cores are subject to such strong radiation from O-type stars ϒ2Vel and Ϛ Pup and formerly the progenitor of the Vela Supernova Remnant that the cloud cores evaporate away from the hot stars into comet-like shapes. It is named after its discoverer, the Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum who published his findings in 1955 in a work entitled,
A Study of diffuse southern H-alpha nebulae.
I recently posted this image in Ha only (
https://astrob.in/sy5ymv/0/) but decided to also present a color image. This was done with both a Ha and OIII filters. Unfortunately, I got tired of fighting the night sky to get some RGB data for the stars, so Ha stars are used in this image.
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