This region honestly looks like a bit of a mess. It goes by the name NGC 7822, and as far as I can tell nobody has come up with a more poetic name for the area depicted here – so you are welcome to call it whatever you want. Maybe the “Messy Nebula.”
It’s an emission region in the constellation Cepheus, and clearly there’s a lot of crazy particle wind activity going on. When I looked closely, I noticed there were lot of very regular looking geometric patterns – straight lines and such. At first I thought this might be an artifact of my camera, and that I was having sensor issues. But then I found the same patterns in photos from other astrophotographers, and so these must actually be real features. In regions such as this, it is not uncommon for high energy particle streams to interact and collide with each other, creating shock waves that can make these kinds of patterns – so I expect that’s what’s going on here. Either that or just dense strips of dust left behind after the lighter gases are swept away.
It is likely there is some intense star formation happening in those bright tangled areas, but also a lot of gaseous material being blown away by strong stellar winds. As nebulae go, this one’s pretty large; at about 150 light years across, and almost 3,000 light years distant, it takes up the full frame of the sensor. Whatever way you look at it, this is truly an interesting and happening scene.
