This is a northern part of the Milky Way, our own galaxy, seen from the inside. It stretches across the image diagonally from Cygnus at the upper left, through Cepheus at lower center, to Cassiopeia at the lower right. Hold your mouse cursor over the image to see constellation and star identifications. The large bright red emission nebulae are star forming regions of glowing hydrogen gas. The dark areas in the plane of the Milky Way are dark nebulae, large clouds of obscuring interstellar matter. At left we have the constellation of Cygnus with the IC 1318, the Butterfly Nebula, near Sadr, and then NGC 7000 and IC 5070, the North America and Pelican Nebulae, above Deneb, the brightest star in the image at magnitude 1.2. Moving down and to the right we come to the very large dark nebula Le Gentil 3, also known as Globular Filament 7. It lies between the North America complex and IC 1396, a large emission nebula next to Herschel's Garnet Star in Cepheus. Continuing along the Milky Way, the next large area of emission nebulosity is the Ced 214 - NGC 7822 complex, which lies between Cepheus and Cassiopeia. In the lower right corner lie the Double Cluster and Double Nebulae. At top right is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. During one of the exposures, a meteor also streaked through the frame not far from M31. North is to the bottom in the above image which covers approximately 58 x 38 degrees of sky.
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