Taken over a three-month period, this image is comprised of ten hours of narrowband data from a monochrome astronomy camera. The gases emit their unique light due to the intense radiation from the triple star system seen toward the center of the image.

The gases photographed here are hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. Each was captured through a separate filter in a black-and-white image. After all the data was collected, the three monochrome images were assigned to the red, green, and blue channels. One of the standard ways of mapping the images to colors is to map sulfur to red, hydrogen to green, and oxygen to blue. Here, the colors have been changed after being combined for a more artistic look. This creates what is known as a "false color" image. The true colors of these gases are red for hydrogen and sulfur and blue-green for oxygen. To show the differences between sulfur and hydrogen, seeing that they are both an intense red, mapping them to colors other than their "true" color is necessary. This method of color rendition is very similar to what is used in processing Hubble images.