AE Auriga is a bluish magnitude 6.0 star about 1300 light years distant which illuminates the carbon-rich dust lanes behind  it which are visible as an irregular-shaped blue reflection nebula.  Behind and surrounding this is an overall  ~ 5 light years diameter irregular shaped HII region - which mainly emits H alpha  and very little OIII.  This nebula is ionized by AE Auriga.  However AE Auriga did not itself form within this gas cloud and is only there by chance.  It is an example of a runaway star, one that gained kinetic energy from a chance interaction with another star long ago and is travelling through the Milky Way at a speed of 100 km/s, and its traveling directly, from the Orion Nebula, where it likely formed about 2.5 million years ago.

AE Aurigae is a young main sequence star of the spectral type O9.5V. It has a mass 23 times that of the Sun, a radius 7.47 times solar, surface temperature of 33,000 K and  is ~ 60,000 times more luminous than the Sun.

This F4 300 mm Newtonian image comprises ~3h of RGB  OSC imaging , ~ 1.2h of UHC filtered RGB , 40 min of monocamera broadband blue and ~ 1h of mono camera HA.  Processing was in PixInsight with images combined into red , blue and green starless channels (weighted in PixMath according to image statistics) before being recombined with addition of RGB stars.

It can be quite difficult to balance the colours well when combining NB with broad band as here so it took a few tries with revision.  The final colours more or less match those of the unfiltered RGB image --and looks more orange than most interpretations of this object -  but with intensified blue and red due to the addition of mono camera BLUE and HA into the final mix.  Most interpretations of this object show the entire HII region as red with the reflection nebulosity as bright blue.  If the parts of the HII region nearest AE Auriga are dusty and part-reflection as well as emission nebula then maybe orange coloration is more appropriate?