Anyone who has read The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle will get the reference above. And if you haven't read it, I envy you. I'd love to be able to read it again for the first time. It's my favorite SF novel.
In any case, LBN 794 in Auriga (I'm guessing it's about 10,000 light years distant based on the distance of nearby IC 417) has intrigued me since I first saw it four years ago. There are so many twists, turns, and tendrils. I've always wanted to shoot this at a longer focal length. The TOA130 with the C5 gives me just enough fov to get it all in a (mostly) single frame. Technically, this is a two-panel mosaic, but I only used about 20% of the second panel in order to get the exact framing I wanted. Also, while I shot 8 hours of it, I didn't see much, if any, real signal in O3, so I processed this as a bi-color HSS image. (Note that Wikipedia lists LBN 794 as part of NGC 1491, the Fossil Footprint nebula. That is incorrect. I think it means to refer to LBN 704.)
There's quite a bit going on in this image. Besides M38 (left of the Hand), which is much closer than LBN 794 at 3,477 light years, the open cluster NGC 1907 appears on the "thumb" of the Hand and is 4,500 light years from our humble abode. The most distant readily apparent object in the field is the planetary nebula Abell 9. It appears in the upper left portion of M38 and is anywhere from 37,000 to 51,000 light years away.
Here's a tight crop of Abell 9 processed in SHO to highlight its oxygen content:
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