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 gas cloud that is just to the upper right of centre in this image. 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 data is from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Robotic Telescope, and was taken in October and November 2019.
Exposures:
- 9 Narrowband Ha, OIII, SII images of 30 minutes each, for a total of 13.5 hours
- 5 each of 3 minutes RGB, totaling 15 minutes of each color.
- There were 5 flats for each set, as well as 16 bias and 20 dark frames.
Some further details:
- Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California
- RCOS 16" f/8.9 (3550mm focal length)]
- MountParamount ME
- Filters SBIG LRGB; SBIG Ha (7nm), OIII (8.5nm), SII (8nm)
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 Starnet++ with the inevitable manual correction of 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.
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