Nebulae

The North American and Pelican Nebulae in Hydrogen Alpha

The North American Nebula and the adjacent Pelican nebula to the right of it are popular objects of the summer and autumn sky in the Northern Hemisphere.  Both of these objects are aptly named because the nebula to the left really does look like the continent of North America being looked at by a pelican to the right!

This post discusses a version of these objects in the light of Hydrogen Alpha 3nm only.  You can see the vast amount of detail that is emitted at this wavelength by the clouds of hydrogen that the nebulae are composed from.

This picture is composed of 48 x 600s exposures with a Takahashi FSQ85 refractor and Moravian G2-8300 CCD camera with an Astrodon 31mm 3nm Ha filter and the Takahashi 0.73 reducer.  The image discussed here is a pure Ha monochrome image but I also combined this data set with RGB colour data as well that you can see here.

A snippet of the above picture showing The Pelican nebula.

This shows the portion of the nebula commonly known as “The Wall”

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