The Pelican and a Ghostly Skull (Jay McNeil)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg) · Contains: 56 Cyg · 57 Cyg · B349 · HD198480 · HD198639 · HD198896 · HD198931 · HD199178 · HD199206 · HD199312 · HD199373 · HD199395 · IC 5070 · LBN 329 · LBN 334 · LBN 338 · LBN 342 · LBN 343 · LBN 350 · LBN 353 · LBN 359 · LDN 933 · Pelican Nebula · The star 56 Cyg · The star 57 Cyg

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The Pelican and a Ghostly Skull

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The Pelican and a Ghostly Skull

Despite the waning moon being overhead, I decided to park my small refractor on the Pelican Nebula region and simply let it cook for about 5 nights from my suburban front yard. After culling the frames due to passing car lights, an occasional train passing less than 40 feet away, and intermittent clouds, I ended up with a total of 28.5 hours of data to play with in PI. I personally like taking a more subtle approach to the Hubble Palette, as no matter how many times I played with the colors and black levels of this image, I kept coming back to my original simple combine. Another attempt brought out much more structure in the dark, dusty areas but at the expense of the overall aesthetic, imho. I found with this much data, the avenues for processing and tone-mapping are relatively endless. I hope everyone enjoys the choices that I made as much as I enjoyed processing it.
Interestingly, the star responsible for all of that ionization action within the Pelican's neck (much of which can be glimpsed on the full resolution image), is deeply imbedded in the super opaque dark cloud (LDN935) located just to left of the Pelican's beak. The star itself is slightly out of this frame and glows at a visual magnitude of merely 13.2. If LDN935 was not between us and that star, it would be a 3.6 magnitude star, glowing brightly to the naked eye!

Clear skies to all!

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8402283
PixInsight job	GRQMVTQYTXKJ0DVJSTNVPYUVBOQY4E6V
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	20h51m21s.83
RA (top/left)	20h55m33s.66
RA (top/right)	20h47m09s.32
RA (bottom/right)	20h47m19s.11
RA (bottom/left)	20h55m24s.83

Dec (center)	+44°02′04″.6
Dec (top/left)	+45°08′23″.2
Dec (top/right)	+45°08′19″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+42°55′14″.7
Dec (bottom/left)	+42°55′18″.7

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The Pelican and a Ghostly Skull

The Pelican and a Ghostly Skull

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