This planetary nebula is one of the showcases of the winter sky because of its peculiar appearance. The inner shell resembles a face, the outer the fur of a parka hood, ending up in a nickname "Eskimo Nebula". An alternative name for the ionized gas shell is the "Clown Face Nebula". You will be able to see the details if you click at the above picture to see the full resolution. The nebula is extremely tiny in angular size and therefore somewhat fuzzy, even through the extremely steady air beneath which the photo was taken. The apparent diameter is very similar to Jupiter, which astronomers usually capture in video sequences instead of long time exposures to beat the atmospheric turbulences.

North is down.

This is the first shot with my new interference filter permitting only the light of hydrogen and oxygen pass and effectively extincting plenty of the terrestial light background. Most of the nebulous structures are glowing in the bueish-green light of the OIII and H-beta lines, but quite a few filaments are strikingly showing their features in the deep-red H-alpha. By superposition with the green background, this ends up in some pinkish "radiation" that appears as if this was emitted from the core of the nebula.

I tried to play with the channels to emphasize the differences in the physicochemical nature of the individual regions: