Not far from the much more famous NGC 1333 (the Embryo nebula), and about a third of the way from the also famous California nebula (NGC 1499) to the extremely famous Pleiades (M45) in the larger Perseus molecular cloud complex, lies IC 348 (lower left)--a very young star-forming region 1,000 light years away. Because of the young age of the IC 348 cluster, astronomers have been able to find three low-mass brown dwarfs in the cluster. Due to their youth, the brown dwarfs still give off enough heat to be detected. The cluster IC 1985 is subsumed within IC 348 and contains a striated reflection nebula that has a significant Ha emission component. According to observations undertaken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, this area is chock full of stars (around half of them!) surrounded by primordial disks that may someday form planetary systems. 

To the north of both and around 100 light years farther away, Atik (Omicron Persei) threatens to overwhelm the pair with the light from its triple-star system visible at a magnitude of 3.76 to 3.88 (depending on where the stars are in their orbits about each other). The dominant star of the bunch is a giant, blue B1 type star with around 10 to 12 solar masses and a surface temperature as hot as six times that of the sun. 

Moving to the right (west), you can find the darker red-chocolate formations designated Barnard 1, 2, 3, and 4 at a closer distance of 800 light years. To the north of that bunch you can easily spot the dominant feature (other than Atik) in the photograph: LBN 749, which surrounds the dark LDNs 1468 and 1470. LBN 749 is an H-II emission region powered by the star HD 278942 (the bright star just south of the central dark region)--a binary system partially obscured by gas and dust. 

Scattered around the field in this image you can spot a large number of very distant galaxies in the background.

I found this a very interesting target. While it often gets picked up incidental to wide-field shots of the California nebula, the Embryo nebula, and the Pleiades, it's fairly rare that amateurs target it directly. But there's a lot going on here that, to me, is worth studying. And it's always nice when an image presents a new entry for my WTF catalog. To the west (right) of IC 348, there's what appears to be a small reflection nebula for which I can find nothing in the literature. So it goes in the catalog as WTF 10. There may well be some documentation on this somewhere, and it's certainly not even remotely a new discovery. But it's a thing I will pay more attention to when I get the CDK up and running at Deep Sky West.