Hi Glen,
Great to see that you've been looking at Gum 5. I've been studying this region in preparation for writing the next section of my Commentary on the Galactic Plane:
http://galaxymap.org/drupal/node/96
If you look at this region in hydrogen-alpha, it appears to be just a small nebular patch midway between the Seagull nebula and Sh 2-310:
http://galaxymap.org/iras/iras.php?c...show_markers=1
but if you look at it in infrared, it seems to be part of a huge shell:
http://galaxymap.org/iras/iras.php?c...show_markers=1
If you take a look at this recent paper:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008ApJ...672..930V
You'll see that this is the direction in which the Orion spur starts to cross the Perseus arm on its way into the outer galaxy. So there are lots of objects here at many different distances.
Kevin