NGC 2467 The Skull and Crossbones Nebula

This uncanny nebula is best suited for Halloween, so it's a bit overdue. If you tilt your head 45 degrees to the left, you should see a super creepy skull! (Hence its nickname, the "Skull and Crossbones Nebula").

Wait a minute before freaking out; it's not like the universe is trying to scare us with a creepy face. We see it because evolution shaped us to be good at face recognition, so we sometimes imagine faces even though there isn't one.

Skulls aside, the nebula is made of star-forming regions where large gas clouds are giving birth to new stars. The skull's left eye is a superluminous star (HD 64455), which looks especially shiny because of the telescope's diffraction spikes. The skull's right eye is a sphere of hydrogen gas energised by a nearby star (Haffner 19). The pink-red glimmer from ionised hydrogen makes it look like the terminator's cyborg eye!

(The original data was acquired from Telescope Live, which I processed using pixinsight and photoshop).

Recognition

This image was published in the BBC Sky at Night Magazine (Jan 2023 Issue).