This is the Iris Nebula, catalogued as NGC 7023 and Caldwell 4. It is a bright reflection nebula located about 1,300 light years from Earth in the constellation of Cepheus. It is essentially a vast cloud of dust 6 light years across, illuminated by a massive hot blue star. A reflection nebula does not emit any light as of itself; it reflects the light of the stars near it, and in this case there is just one of them - a young blue star of magnitude +7.4 designated HD 200775. If there were more nearby stars to pick out the swirls and eddies of the cloud it would be much more dramatic.

This is a very messy dust cloud and it's hard to see how it formed. Presumably it originated as the silicon layer of a star nearing supernova which then condensed into dust after the silicon was blown away from the star. That would explain a symmetric sphere of dust, but there are no nearby stars other than the one blue giant to influence the motion of the dust cloud. Perhaps the cloud was stirred up by some passing wandering stars which are now long gone.

There is plenty of other stellar detritus, though just a faint glow of the red hydrogen alpha light. Using the Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers better equipped than me have discovered prominent emission lines at 7.04μm that clearly show the presence of carbon fullerenes (C60), making it the first firm detection of neutral fullerenes in interstellar space and one of the largest molecules detected in space. The fullerenes are located more towards the central star and in the central cavity of the nebula.