Surveys of the Milky Way
A false-colour composite of the sky in the vicinity of the HII region, IC 1396B, in Cepheus, combining the r, i and H-alpha imagery from IPHAS. This nebulous region is a star-forming nursery, in which the diffuse emission (coloured orange/yellow) is due to hydrogen atoms excited by the far ultraviolet light from newly-created hot massive stars. The image scale here is roughly 15 x 15 square arcminutes, with N to the left and E down. (picture credit: Nick Wright)