This image is not only beautiful but also very interesting. At its centre is a bright star, which is in reality a triple star (whose components are very close together), the main one being at least 8 times heavier than our Sun. It is about 1000 light-years away, but the uncertainty on this is at least 150 light-years. Surrounding that is a large cloud made up of, essentially, soot.

In some areas this cloud is condensing into new stars, in some it’s being blown away by the radiation from the stars embedded in it. It is also being brightly lit up in blue light, reflecting the light coming from the stars within it.  And in other areas it just billows, turning the light from stars behind it to a deep red colour, like a sunset on Earth.

To the left of the central bright star is a vaguely L-shaped void in the sooty clouds, where background stars shine through. In his 1931 catalogue the Swedish astronomer Per Collinder identified this as a star cluster (his identification being Collinder 427). The stars are all very faint at around magnitude 16 or fainter. 

The name, Iris Nebula, is supposedly a reference to the flower of the same name, and it was discovered by William Herschel in 1794.