This is the "Ghost of Cassiopeia", IC 63, an emission and reflection nebula in ... Cassiopeia! It's around Navi or Gamma Cassiopeiae, the center star of the W. Navi is a huge, very bright star -- it's 17 times the Sun's mass and radiates some 34,000 times the Sun's energy, burning hot blue. It also is a rapidly spinning star, giving it an equatorial bulge and causing it to cast off a hot disk of gas.
The nebula IC 63 is being directly irradiated by Navi's massive output of UV, causing it to both glow (emission, red) and shine (blue, reflection from the star light). I love this shot - taking it from a dark site out in the Arizona desert (the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association's Chiricahua Astronomy Complex) let me get some positively radiant stars and some really subtle broadband color - like the places where you can see dark nebulosity shadowing out stars in the margins, and some almost goldish dust in some places. Taking additional narrowband helped me really get the red contrast of the Hydrogen Alpha gas, which otherwise is overpowered by the sea of stars (Cassiopeia is in the Milky Way band). And after a ton of processing, I was able to tame the huge halo of Navi.
Had a bunch of trouble with my mount while I shot this (it might need to get serviced) and clouds have been way too constant for the "Valley of the Sun", so had to shoot this every chance I had. But I love this result.
Broadband shot at the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association's Chiricahua Astronomy Complex; Narrowband shot in my Phoenix backyard. Added in the narrowband using continuum subtraction via this tutorial:
https://www.nightphotons.com/guides/advanced-narrowband-combination
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