This image is filled with dust.  Specifically, a dust cloud catalogued as MBM 54, less than a thousand light years away, lit up by the ambient glow of our own galaxy.  Through this dust, we can see other galaxies that lie way, way beyond our own, the most prominent of which is NGC 7497, a spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years away. Here we see it almost edge-on through the dust cloud.  But look more closely, and you can see many more galaxies through the dust.  They may be tiny and faint, but they're there. 

I have always had a thing for integrated flux nebulae and dark nebulae: they're almost always my favorite images I see posted here. I've also never really had the opportunity to image them myself, given my location and skies, until recently.  So here's my first crack at one, which was an interesting challenge. 

First, these kinds of things are plain tough to image and process, just at baseline: they're really faint, and as such I needed to be mindful of the moon and gradients, and exercise careful background extraction and stretching to try to illuminate the detail.  I found myself struggling with the balance of detail vs noise, more so than most images. It's one of those things I'll tinker with endlessly if I don't stop myself, so I've gone ahead and drawn the line in the sand and posted here. Maybe I'll eventually come back to it, particularly if I get more data during a new moon. 

Second, to make it even more challenging, there are a couple of very bright stars located just outside the frame here, and they (or maybe it was the partial moon) created some kind of weird reflection within my imaging system that showed up just in my green and blue subs. When I did the RGB combine, I had these weird green and blue patterns show up.  Try as I might, I just couldn't get them out to my satisfaction, so I turned to expert help: I reached out to @Adam Block, whose outstanding Pixinsight and processing tutorial site I subscribe to and who has created spectacular images for many years, many of which are posted on this site. Adam was kind enough to point me to a technique of his wherein I effectively patched in pixels from my red master to the afflicted areas within the green and blue masters, and it did an excellent job covering up the reflection gremlins sufficiently to move forward with processing.  If you haven't checked out Adam's website, do so: it's a wealth of knowledge and even after using Pixinsight for years, I've learned a ton. 

Anyway, here we are.  I'd love to get more (and cleaner) data on this and have another go at it, but for now I'm putting down the pen (er, mouse) and walking away.  Hope I did it some measure of justice.  As always, C&C are welcome.