In short, this is a picture of small part of the sky. I placed the camera outfitted with a telephoto lens on a mount which compensates for the Earth's rotation, opened the shutter and exposed for 5 minutes. Took 5 of these, and co-added and post processed the final image (remove noise, saturate colors) using specialized software.
The long story:
From a light polluted site, Monoceros is a barren wasteland. Darker sites give life to this area of the sky, with the faint glow of the Winter Mily Way filling the area east of Orion.
The area is filled with Deep Sky objects. To the bottom of the image, the magnificent Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237-39.46), an HII region forming stars. The star cluster in the center of the nebula is NGC224, formed in the very "heart" of the nebula and making it "glow" by bombarding it with UV photons.
I've seen the Rosette more or less how it's visible here from the Winter Star Party in 2009 (where this picture is also taken), using my 14" Dobsonian, a WO 28mm UWAN eyepiece and Astronomik 2" OIII filter. The combination gave me enough field to make out the outline of the nebula. I've seen it many other times from places with worse skies and far smaller scopes (even glimpsed in binoculars), but you need a big scope and a wide view if you want to see it better. According to the late Walter Scott Houston, a dark sky and a nebula filter held to your eye is enough to glimpse it. I tried that several times, but never managed to see it. Maybe my skies were never dark enough.
To the top/left of the image (N) lies NGC 2264, an emission/reflection nebular complex better know as the backdrop of a small dark nebula called the Cone Nebula. The Cone is very small and barely discernible to the SSE of the main emission complex, just below a yellow star.
Top/right of the image we find IC 2169, a reflection nebula (Dreyer's Nebula?), with a few dust-lanes superimposed on it.
Between IC2169 and NGC 2266, and faintly connected to NGC2264 you can see a a large diffuse emission nebula. The whole complex is the "tip" of the same huge mollecular cloud. Read here: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/nebulae/ngc2264.html , if you'd like more detail about the region..
To the top of IC2169 one can notice three "fuzzy" stars, they're reflection nebulae surrounding three stars embedded in the mollecular cloud. From left to right (E to W), NGC 2247, NGC 2245 and IC 446.
To the top center of the image lies Trumpler 5, a distant (3 kpc), large (20 pc), old (the stars are all old red supergiants) and very massive (3000 solar mases) open clusters in the Galaxy! For comparison, Rosette nebula (at the bottom of the frame) is also abotu 20 pc diameter and situated at 1.6 kpc. Hmm, maybe not the best comparison. See http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1998A&AS..133...25K for details about Trumpler 5.
Ah, and just peaking over the edge of the image, to the very bottom, is what I think it's a part of the emission nebula Shapeless 2-282!
Light pollution from nearby Pine Key can be seen in the bottom right (SW) corner of the image. I think.
