The bright star in this image is the supergiant Gamma Cygni (properly known as Sadr), the center star in the "Northern Cross" asterism, located in the summertime constellation Cygnus.

All around Gamma Cygni is an immense region of dust and glowing gas, located deep in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The brightest area to the left of Gamma Cygni is known as NGC 1318 and has been given the name "Butterfly Nebula" -- use your imagination just a bit and you can probably make out the two glowing red wings on either side of the dark body of the butterfly.

Gamma Cygni is actually nowhere near the nebula; it's a foreground star, located only about 750 light years from Earth, while the nebula is estimated to be around 2000 to 5000 light years away.

This image was captured on the evening of August 7, at the Astronomical Society of Kansas City's Dark Sky Site near Butler, MO, and consists of a stack of 14 exposures of 10 minutes each, for a total time of nearly 2.5 hours.