Running Chicken Nebula: Located in the constellation of Centaurus this huge emission nebula is a tremendous star cradle, where stars of different sizes are continously born. These young bright stars excite the surroundind gas and dust to glow in specific spectral colors. 

This deep image with 8.5 hours of total exposure was put together by adding three different sets of images taken with narrow band filters, representing emission lines of three atoms: sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen. Dark Red represents the content of sulfur, Bright Red hydrogen and Cyan oxygen in the surrounding gas.In this way the turbulent details, i.e. shock waves, of the gas cloud are displayed in greater detail.

Left of the nebula the Open Cluster NGC 3766 can be seen.

Please have a look at the Hi-res image to view these details.