This is the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, along with the Flame Nebula and several smaller emission nebulae. The specific star lighting up the Horsehead is "Sigma Orionis", a name worthy of Star Wars, but more romantically named "Alnitak" by Arabic astronomers. It is the left-most star of Orion's belt. From my house the belt stars clear the trees in the east around 2:30am and hits the next bunch of trees at 5am. It's a frustrating target.

We see the Orion nebula through a huge cloud of molecular hydrogen, and any stars that are in that cloud energize electrons in the hydrogen atoms, which then lose that extra energy by emitting red light. I've made the red colour more orange than it should be here to bring out the folds and turbulence in the nebulae. All these nebulae are structurally the same, just seen in different light as illuminated by stars of varying size, colour, distance and location. The odd black cloud of dust or neutral hydrogen adds interest to the scene by absorbing light rather than emitting it.

The Horsehead itself is about 1260 light years away from the Earth and is in a piece of nebula that spans the interior of a neutral hydrogen shell 13 light years across. These are sterile numbers; the scale of the universe is beyond incomprehensible.