IC2177 Seagull Nebula is lurking in the southern outskirts of the constellation of Monoceros, close to the border with the Canis Major constellation. This is a large, roughly circular region of interstellar matter (dust and gas). Hydrogen in this area is excited to light in the deep red color by the hot HD 53367 star located in the “head” of the Seagull – which looks like an eye.
The IC2177 alone is a Seagull’s head. Its body and wings contain several other objects designated in different catalogs – open star clusters and other emission and reflection nebulae. The distance to this target is estimated at 3650 light-years. It is imaged quite often because it looks very impressive in the long-exposed photos. Many of the available images of the Seagull Nebula were done using narrowband filters. This kind of imaging reveals a great amount of features in the nebula, but at the same time, it hides delicate and subtle sights of reflection nebulosity in this area.
I captured the image above with my travel setup during the winter stay near Malaga in Spain. Conditions were not perfect, but still, some reflection nebulosity was recorded. Some of them are present in the van den Berg catalog of reflection nebulae. The Seagull’s head and right (southern) wing areas look especially interesting. LRGB images of these fragments with a larger scale under a dark sky should give a very impressive outcome. Unfortunately, this sky area is pretty low in the northern hemisphere and requires a good location to be able to be imaged correctly.
There are several interesting features in the bottom part of the image (actually, now I regret a little that I did not frame this image a bit lower). One of them is the vdB 95 reflection nebula in the lower part a bit left from the centre. It surrounds double star FN Canis Majoris, which is a runaway star associated with the Sh2-296 nebula. You can easily spot a conspicuous bow-shock feature that apparently originates at the FN Canis Majoris star.
Image technical data: Date: February 2025 Location: near Malaga, Spain Telescope: TS CF-APO 80/480 Corrector: TS FF/FR 0.8x Camera: Player One Ares-C Mount: AM3 Guiding: ASI224 + SV165 Exposures: 200x2 minutes Conditions: Bortle 4-5, transparency and seeing good
