This image shows a portion of the Pelican Nebula, IC5070, which is a gorgeous HII region in the North American Nebula. The Pelican is interesting, not only for its beautiful profile, but more seriously as it is a very active region of evolving gas clouds and star formation. The young energetic stars here are heating the cold gas clouds, creating the ionization front visible here, as it expands outward. There are many dark filaments of cold gas, including the Herbig-Haro object HH 555 which is a protostar that is emitting two bright jets of partially ionized gas. The protostar and jets are seen at the end of the dark pillar that is just to the upper right of centre. The hot gas will eventually all be blown away, in a few hundred thousand years at most, so take a good look while you can!

The image makes use of data is from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Robotic Telescope, which was taken in October and November 2019. It also includes new data from the same source, but in July 2020. 

Exposures are 26, 22 and 25 Narrowband  Ha, OIII, SII images respectively of 30 minutes each, for a total of 36.5 hours; and 5 each of 3 minutes RGB, totaling 15 minutes each.•         

There were 5 flats for each set, as well as 16 bias and 20 dark frames.  

Data is  from Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California with a RCOS 16" f/8.9 (3550mm FL), Paramount ME Mount, and SBIG LRGB;  SBIG Ha (7nm), OIII (8.5nm), SII (8nm) filters.

I did the calibration, registration and stacking using DSS, stretching and other image processing in Startools in SHO  (40SII+60Ha,70Ha+30OIII,100OIII) . A starless image was created using the StarXTerminator Plugin in Photoshop, with the inevitable manual correction of any horrible artifacts (hopefully I got most of them). The starless image was added as a top screen layer in Photoshop. In Photoshop I applied the standard HST color mapping protocol to the SHO image as well as a manual APF-R protocol to bring out detail.

I previously used the 13.5 hours of NB data from 2019 to create the image shown on Astrobin: [url=http:// https://www.astrobin.com/hu85pl/0/]Using 13.5 hrs data[/url] The current image has thus used nearly 3X as much NB exposure time. Also, I took quite a different tack with respect to color and light and drama in the current image. I hope you like it.