Yes, officially it is the Ghost of Cassiopeia (IC63), but it has never looked like a ghost to me.  I can only see a snake, a Cobra, whose tail (IC59) is all wound up and the head (IC63) is  ready to strike at that blazing sun, Gamma Cas, who has just exited stage upper left (upper right in the portrait orientation).

The Cobra fortunately is 550 light years away. The UV light from Gamma Cassiopeia, a blue-white subgiant variable star only 3 light years away from IC63, reflects off dust to provide the blue glow, while  exciting the  red glow from hydrogen Halpha emission. The (missing) Gamma Cas is 55,000 times more luminous than the Sun, and also  14 times larger and 19 times more massive, exciting not only IC63 and IC59, but also a whole region of over 2 degrees extent. 

Gamma Cas is fascinating in itself, it rotates at the incredible speed of 1.6 million kilometres per hour — more than 200 times faster than the Sun, resulting in a squashed appearance. The rotation is so fast that it causes eruptions of mass into a surrounding disk. This mass loss is related to the observed brightness variations.

My  image is a combination of about 16 hours each using L-eNhance and L-eXtreme HO filters. The narrower band L-eXtreme provides better contrast here for Ha, but the L-eNhance acts as a Light Pollution filter allowing more of the amazing blue reflection nebulosity to shine through. Both filters were essential in my Bortle 8 skies.

My image was calibrated, registered and stacked using DeepSkyStacker, using both L-eXtreme and L-eNhance data. Startools was used to extract the Lum (from RGB), Ha (from R), OIII (from G+B), and  synthetic G (from R+G) according to Steve Cannistra’s method. These files were then loaded into StarTools as R, B and G respectively, with a 1.5X weight on G. After Startools processing, in Photoshop the stars were extracted with StarXterminator. The starless layer was processed using the AFP-R multi-scale unsharp mask (as used by NASA). Noise in all layers was reduced with StarXterminator.

Final color and levels adjustments were done in Photoshop. A slight crop was done to remove the extremely bright star Gamma Cas, as it was hogging the show at this long exposure—hopefully I captured its impact even with it missing from the frame.