Two of the most photographed objects in the sky sit a few degrees apart, which is just far enough to miss fitting in one frame. So this is two panels, stitched. The join runs down the middle, through the faintest and flattest part of the field, and that’s the difficult bit: with no structure to distract the eye, any mismatch in brightness between the two panels shows up as a straight line where nature never put one. Both halves belong to the same molecular cloud, roughly 1,400 light-years off, and the red filling every corner is hydrogen from that cloud carrying on well past the edges of the image.
