This is The Foresaken Nebula; it is close to the star Deneb in the constellation Cygnus and it is catalogued as IC 5068. It's a complex, multi-layered bit of space when looked at from the Earth; it can be deceptive, and hard to sort out.

Right at the back, a long way away towards the center of the galaxy is a dense star field; this can be seen at the left-hand edge of the image.

In front of the star field and obscuring most of it is a vast cloud of hydrogen, characterized by the red H-alpha light. Had I bothered to filter out the hydrogen I would have seen a lot more colours in a phenomenally confused mess of brushwork. I didn't do this, so my image is dominated by red light.

Between us and the hydrogen is a ragged cloud of absorbent dust, most likely silicon and oxygen - sand. It soaks up any light trying to get through it, so it appears black. What looks like a window to clear starlight at the left of the image is in fact a mass of space dust hiding whatever is behind it - hydrogen and stars.

In front of all this are scattered stars in our arm of the Milky way. The light they send away from us scatters back towards us from the hydrogen cloud and some of it finds its way into my telescope.

It's all just space dust with a contamination of light-ish elements left over from some ancient novae and supernovae. It looks more impressive than it is.