Nebulae in Norma

When I was collecting my stellar photons from those sparkly, southern skies last summer I rushed back into my little warm chalet to process the photos. I discovered a new nebula in Norma! Well it had been there all along, but I like to think that. It's a personal discovery. It looks like a swooping giant bird. Apparently it is called NGC 6188, and there is another planetary like nebula towards its north west (upper right), which appears as a fuzzy star on my poor resolution picture. You can see zeta Scorpii at the top, along with another one of my personal discoveries, namely a big faint red patchy ring around the whole cluster. Actually come to think of it, the whole picture is teaming with my new 'personal' discoveries. Dark, straight lines. Who said nature doesn't like straight lines? a physics teacher? Well my last few years of astrophotography have shown me many rows of stars in lines that are too straight to be chance alignments. There are a sequence of giant (I mean HUGE and capitalisation of the letters really is quite an understatement), dark, frigid clouds across the picture. Also, there seems to be a tinge more redness down towards where the tree has made its impression on the moving stack of photos that went into producing this image, but that could easily be an artefact of the processing. The atmopheric extinction of starlight shows up with the lack of light pollution, at such high contrast.