What it is
The Fireworks Galaxy, NGC 6946, is a spiral galaxy seen almost face-on, on the border of Cepheus and Cygnus. It earned its name from its supernovae: astronomers have recorded ten exploding stars in it since 1917, more than in any other galaxy.
How far away
About 25 million light-years. It sits close to the plane of our own Milky Way, so we see it through a veil of our galaxy's dust and a dense field of foreground stars. That's why the frame is so full of stars.
Also in the frame
The tight group of stars at the upper right is NGC 6939, an open star cluster in our own galaxy. It is only a few thousand light-years away, a near neighbour beside a galaxy thousands of times farther off.