This is actually a small chunk of a much larger nebula. The Question Mark Nebula in Cepheus is very large relative to this telescope and camera’s field of view. This is a three panel mosaic and it still covers only a tiny fraction of the nebula.

You can see from this screenshot that shows how it was framed that we have only the top of the “question mark”. It would probably take 30-36 panels to cover the entire nebula and I don’t think my computer could even process it because the resulting image would be so large.

The region is a large emission nebula though there are pockets of dark nebulosity throughout.

The nebula is about 2,900 light years away. Well….maybe. The Wikipedia page on the nebula is a little ambiguous when referring to distance. It says that Sh2-171 is not actually physically distant from the nebula and might be 4,800 light years away (or maybe 4,800 light years more distant than NGC 7822. This is my best interpretation of the text. And, when we’re talking about the distance of something like a nebula we’re generally talking about average distances or the distance to the center of mass of the nebula. Parts of it will be closer and parts will be further.

This is a three part mosaic consisting of a total of 78h 20m of HOOSY data. For all the technical details, see astrobin.