Casitas de Gila, Gila, NM, October 15 - 18, 2023

I completed my summer tour of Cygnus with the Pelican Nebula, a large emission region situated next to the American Nebula, NCG 7000.  The Pelican is of interest because it has a particularly active mix of star formation and evolving gas clouds.  The light from young energetic stars is slowly transforming cold gas to hot and causing an ionization front gradually to advance outward.  Particularly dense filaments of cold gas still remain.  IC 5070 is about 1,800 light-years from Earth. (Wikipedia)

A sufficient number of subframes were collected for all filters except green.  Intermittent clouds caused large halos around the stars, so I tossed half the green subframes.  Since RGB was used for the stars only, it did not make much of a difference in the result.  I tried several narrowband filter combinations (SHO and blends mapped to RGB) to create something of interest.  I ended up using the SHO Hubble pallet.  Color management was completed using color masks and manipulating various regions with several tools in PixInsight.  The Pelican still looks flat to me, as the OIII signal does not have much detail.

Imaging details:

Stellarvue SVX102T refractor with 0.74x focal reducer (FL = 528mm, f/5.2)
ZWO large off-axis guider with a ZWO ASI 174MM mini guide camera
Losmandy G11 mount with Gemini 2
ZWO ASI 2600MM Pro cooled monochrome camera (-10C)
Chroma 36mm Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen-III, Sulfur-II, Red, Green, and Blue filters
Equatorial camera rotation: 0 degrees

Software:    Sequence Generator Pro, ASTAP plate solving, PHD2 guiding, 
    Losmandy Gemini ASCOM mount control and web client interface,
    SharpCap Pro for polar alignment with a Polemaster camera,
    PixInsight 1.8.9-2,
    Photoshop 2024

Hydrogen-a 10 min x 18 subframes (180 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning
Oxygen-III  10 min x 18 subframes (180 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning
Sulfur-II.     10 min x 18 subframes (180 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning
Red             2 min x 31 subframes (62 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning
Green          2 min x 14 subframes (28 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning
Blue            2 min x 28 subframes (56 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning

Total integration time: 11.4 hours