The bright regions G353.24+0.64 and G353.1+0.6 will be analyzed in a subsequent paper.

Our study provides new information about the interstellar dust, and the ionized and neutral gas distributions in the complex and the dust and gas masses. Interstellar bubbles,  regions, and photodissociation regions (PDRs) excited by known members of the open cluster Pis24 and newly inferred massive stars in the complex are revealed.

Observations
============

Optical images
--------------

Narrow-band , , and , and broad-band $V$ and $R$ CCD images were obtained on May 1999, using the Curtis-Schmidt Camera at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Chile. The camera was equipped with a Site2K $2048\times2048$ array and has a pixel scale of 2.3 arcsec pixel$^{-1}$. The seeing during observations was typically about 1 arcsec giving a pronounced undersampling for point sources. The narrow-band images were obtained with filters[^2] centred at 5027Å, 6567Å, and 6744Å, with a FWHM of about 50Å, 68Å, and 50Å, respectively. The  filter also includes some contamination of neighbouring \[NII\] nebular emission lines at 6548Å and 6584Å.

The individual images in each filter were corrected by bias level and flat-field, and then combined into a single mosaic using IRAF routines[^3]. These mosaics were registered by using hundreds 