Yet another stab at it...

Raw frames courtesy of Deep Sky West Remote Observatory in New Mexico, USA. (deepskywest.com) Data obtained with FSQ 106EDXiii / QSI683wsg / Lodestar / Paramount MyT.

21 hrs total integration (16x900s R, 16x900s G, 16x900s B, and 18x1800s H-alpha). The palette is RGB with H-alpha serving as Luminance.

What is exciting about this version is, after very careful processing in the linear domain, the stretched version is (A) almost so red it hurts the eyes, and (B) you can discern the smoky over-cloud in the central portion of the nebula, as you would expect in looking through a shell of the stuff that glows so brightly when viewed through the edges of the shell.

The fact that the over-cloud is so light, while the edges are so bright, gives some evidence of the size of the glowing shell. In the central regions, looking almost at normal incidence, the shell is optically thin. We are looking through both front and back of the shell to see that smoky stuff.

But along the edges, where we discern a very bright glow, we appear to have considerable optical depth. That implies that the edges have some physical depth to them. Calculations of the optical depth of Ha clouds shows that you reach e-folding scale length over distance of several hundred parsecs.

Hence we also have good reason to believe that a number of the field stars in this image reside within that glowing shell. Stars have a mean free separation of 10's of parsecs, and if the shell extends across several hundred parsecs, then there ought to be a few thousand stars inside the shell.

I would also suggest that the way the bright edges feather toward the interior with gradually darkening and less impressive extensions means that we are seeing gradually less optical depth coming from regions above and behind the edge region, rather than a petering out of the edge stuff extending normally toward the interior.

I would back up this argument by pointing out the mountainous protrusions along the edge which point toward the interior. These are also very bright and impressive, and hence must be viewed nearly on edge to gain the optical depth indicated by the intensity of their glow. So any protrusions from the edge retain their impressive glow, as contrasted with the darker stuff which appears to be emanating from the edge toward the interior regions. Those darker things are possibly not coming from the edge, but rather from above and below, in regions where we are looking less edge-on through less optical depth.

Someday, maybe we will be able to measure parallax to cloud features and determine once and for all the actual 3-D structure of objects like these.

-- there is also the question of which regions are dark by virtue of dark clouds versus dark by virtue of not glowing red. You can see dark clouds along the outside, near the "throat" of the nebula toward the left. So are the holes beneath the glowing over-cloud dark because they are empty of glowing material, or are they filled with dark dust clouds?

Here, I would suggest a star areal density analysis to help answer the question. Where there are dark dust clouds, we cannot see through them, and any field stars must likely be between us and the clouds. So areal density of stars should appear lower than average.