English: Area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467, located in the southern constellation of Puppis ("The Stern"). With an age of a few million years at most, it is a very active stellar nursery, where new stars are born continuously from large clouds of dust and gas. The image, looking like a colourful cosmic ghost or a gigantic celestial Mandrill, contains the open clusters Haffner 18 (annotated in Commons, centre) and Haffner 19 (annotated, middle right: it is located inside the smaller pink region — the lower eye of the Mandrill), as well as vast areas of ionised gas. The bright star at the centre of the largest pink region on the bottom of the image is HD 64315, a massive young star that is helping shaping the structure of the whole nebular region. HD 64568 (annotated, upper right) is a hot, extremely massive main sequence blue-white star that is the prototype of the O3 V((f*)) spectral category.

In the center of this image, the open stellar cluster Haffner 18 illustrates three different stages of this process of star formation: In the centre of the annotated area, a group of mature stars that have already dispersed their birth nebulae represents the completed product or immediate past of the star-formation process. Towards the top left of the annotated area, a very young star, FM3060a, just come into existence and still surrounded by its birth cocoon of gas, provides insight into the earliest moments of star birth. Finally, the dust clouds towards the bottom left corner of the annotated area are active stellar nurseries that will produce more new stars in the future. [1]

This image of NGC 2467 is based on 49 images in six different filters obtained in December 2003 with the Wide-Field Imager camera at the 2.2m MPG/ESO telescope, located at La Silla, in Chile. North is right and East is to the top. Bright red denotes the H-alpha line. Green denotes the green emission lines of doubly ionized oxygen OIII.