Reflections of the Ghost Nebula.

Do any shapes seem to jump out at you from this interstellar field of stars and dust? The jeweled expanse, filled with faint, starlight-reflecting clouds, drifts through the night in the royal constellation of Cepheus . Far from your own neighborhood on planet Earth , these ghostly apparitions lurk along the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. Over two light-year s across and brighter than the other spooky chimeras, VdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula , seen at toward the bottom of the featured image . Within the reflection nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation.