The Pelican Nebula (IC 5070)

The Pelican is a target I’ve only discovered since stumbling into astrophotography. It’s fairly bright, and full of delicate details. This is one of the first images I’ve taken with my new monochrome camera. As such, these are false colors. I’m using the “SHO” palette here, or Sulfur, Hydrogen, Oxygen, cast to red, green and blue, respectively. This is sometimes called the “Hubble Palette.” The new camera is remarkably sensitive, even filtering most of the light out, keeping only 6nm, less than 6 hours of integration time yields wonderfully bright images.

This region is technically part of the same nebula as the “North American Nebula” but a dark dust lane visibly divides the two, giving them individual designators.

Zooming in on the bright core of the nebula reveals some fascinating little noodly bits.

Below are some more “true color” representations taken with my older CMOS camera. You can kind of make out the “noodly bits” in my previous camera, but not nearly to the same extent.