IC1871 is a formation of gas and dust located in the much larger Soul Nebula.  It lies in the constellation Cassiopeia at an estimated distance of 6,500 light-years from the Earth.  Like clouds in our Earthly skies, the gas and dust in celestial nebulae often resemble familiar objects.  The image above is centered on a prominent "mountainous" feature in IC1871.

The image above was assembled from three narrowband filtered images.  These consisted of SII mapped to red, Ha mapped to green, and OIII mapped to blue.  The Ha filtered image was also used for the luminance channel.  The resulting image is a false color image using the standard Hubble palette.  The stars were imaged using regular red, green, and blue filters and superimposed over the narrowband background image.