Rick,

very good picture, I didn't expect this object to give such a good target.
As for the blue regions I would think that these are probably HII regions
where blue giants have already been "born". If they also show in Halpha
there is probably some gas left that can be ionized by the new blue stars.
I have images of NGC 2366 waiting to be processed, which is a rather similar
object, and it also has a very bright region that I expected to be a red HII
region, while it was clearly blue when I did a quick RGB .

Stefan