IC 5070 - The Pelican Nebula. This rich region of gas and dust is located 1800 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. It is separated from the North American Nebula by a dark region of dust. The Pelican Nebula is a very active in star formation and the growing collection of hot new stars being created there are slowly transforming cold gasses too hot gases that are ionized.

I shot this target about a year ago using the One-Shot Color Camera. At the time, I could not see why it is called the Pelican Nebula. Because it is a region that is rich in Ionized gas, I decided to try again and this time use the Mono camera and Narrowband filters to take images using Hydrogen-Alpha, Oxygen-3, and Sodium-2 filters. With this result, I can clearly see the "pelican" in this image. Can you?

This is actually not my final version of this image.

As we enter the fall season, we get a lot of clouds and clear nights become harder to come by. We had one clear evening the other night and I was able to get about 3.5 hours of integration time collected before a cloud deck came in and shut me down. Ideally - I like to get at least one or maybe two more nights of data on this. Even though I was light on integration, I was curious to see what I had here, so I processed this initial image. I was not expecting too much since I only had about an hour per filter, but with some careful noise reduction, I was surprised that it looks as good as it does. Not where I want to end up, but not too bad of a start.

I also had another challenge. 57 Cygni caused significant halo artifacts with two of my filters - the O3 and the S2. I am using a starter set of ZWO narrowband filters and I had heard that these can cause haloes and reflection artifacts but I had not run onto them until this image with the bright star in the image field. It took a lot of processing to diminish this artifact - so I think I will be upgrading my filters in the near future….

I also like to take RGB images of these narrowband targets so I can replace the narrowband stars with RGB stars that look more natural. Unfortunately, the clouds moved in before I could capture those images, so that is also on my "todo" list.

Thanks for looking - and look for an update on this image - assuming we eve get a clear night again! ;-)

Pat

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Here are the details for this image:

17 x 500 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C, unity gain, ZWO Gen II Ha Filter

12 x 500 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C, unity gain, ZWO Gen II O3 Filter

12 x 500 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C, unity gain, ZWO Gen II S2 Filter

50 Bias exposures

25 Dark exposures

50 Ha Flats

50 O3 Flats

50 S2 Flats

Capture Hardware:

Scope: Astrophysics 130mm Starfire F/8.35 APO refractor

Guide Scope: Televue 76mm Doublet

Camera: ZWO ASI1600mm-pro with ZWO Filter wheel with ZWO filter set

Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290Mini

Focus Motor: Pegasus Astro Focus Cube 2

Camera Rotator: Pegasus Astro Falcon

Mount: Ioptron CEM60

Polar Alignment: Polemaster camera

Capture Software: PHD2 Guider, Sequence Generator Pro controller

Image Processing: Pixinsight, Photoshop - assisted by Coffee, extensive processing indecision and second guessing, editor regret and much swearing…..