Someone called this the Magnificent Seven, which of course is a Marlboro Country remake of the Seven Samurai by Kurosawa.
Taken on the night of the full moon, and the night before. Beggars can't be choosers. So far 7 hrs H-alpha mapped to yellow, and 8 hrs OIII mapped to blue. Palette then rotated 15 degrees toward the red for aesthetics.
The original image is here.
Another name might be the Chocolate Box - lots of goodies wrapped in brightly coloured foil, all different. The degree of separation of H-alpha rich and OIII rich chocolates is most impressive.
The brightest bluest patch toward top right is NGC 249, and the smaller bluish patch to its left is NGC 261. The bright central aqua-blue stripy patch is NGC 267.
We had a go at this with the old SBIG camera a few years ago but achieved half the exposure and only 2/3 of the field height, so there are some new features in here at the bottom.
There are several star clusters with many tiny stars. There is what looks plausibly like an OIII rich supernova remnant about 40% of the way toward 9 o'clock. There are multiple concentric shells richer in H-alpha about 50% of the way toward 1 o'clock, giving an appearance reminiscent of brain coral. There are other more dispersed H-alpha bubbles toward 3 o'clock and 4:30, and a faint but pretty arc fragment say 80% of the way toward 4 o'clock.
Toward 5 o'clock is an isolated ball which in monochrome looks very like a tomato, but it shows a patchy mixture of H-alpha and OIII.
The general appearance suggestive of multiple past supernovas, and the very strong separation into separate H-alpha regions and OIII regions is most reminiscent of the Chalice Nebula in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and presumably the physics is similar.
Because of the guessed-at supernova remnant history, we plan to do a couple nights worth of SII, once the moon and the rain go away, but this is our first imaging run for quite a while so we wanted to show progress so far on this intriguingly rich and busy part of the SMC.
Very best,
Mike and Trish