This is IC5146, the Cocoon Nebula, as seen from Naples, NY on a night in July 2024. It's 2500 light years away so it looks pretty much the same from anywhere else on this Earth. It is simultaneously an emision and reflection nebula and the catalogue number IC5146 actually refers to a bunch of stars situated in or near a gas cloud - the cloud being the fuzzy pink stuff in the image and the dark cloud trailing off into the stellar west.

The nebula itself is designated Barnard 168. Astronomers have a million ways of breaking things up.

IC5146 / B168 is in the constellation Cygnus so we are looking straight into the plane of the Milky Way, staring inwards to some of the most dense star clouds in the galaxy. This region is a stellar nursery where star-formation is ongoing, with hundreds of energetic young stars kicking out ionizing radiation, which is either caught and re-emitted or reflected by the nebula.

This picture is the result of 4.5 hours of exposure time on a near moonless night, and about 10 hours of image stacking and processing. I took the flats and darks from and earlier session the previous night.