The rich field of beautiful summertime targets within our Milky Way is starting to creep into view in the early hours of the morning. I decided to wake up at 3 AM to capture an image of the Crescent Nebula. This is the finest detail I've ever been able to capture of it, including both the ionized hydrogen and the faint outer ionized oxygen shell. A Wolf-Rayet star at its core shed these materials when it expanded into its red giant phase hundreds of thousands of years ago, and now its intense stellar radiation is ionizing these outer shells and making them glow...like a giant brain in the sky! :)

Copyright: Alex Hawkinson