Around the Pelican Nebula

The smaller Pelican Nebula IC5070 on the right indeed belongs to the much more prominent North America Nebula NGC7000 on the left. A dark molecular cloud in front of them splits this region into parts.

To obtain the colors in this composition I used some sort of a Hubble Palette, so the normally reddish hydrogen image is rendered in green. A miniscule tuning of tone curves was used to mix this kind of unrealistic green with the other layers into different colors. The RGB layer shown on the left resembles the visual colors as we would see it.

If you are interested how I combine narrowband data, check out the page From Mono to Color.

The Pelican Nebula is a quite special target for me, since it happens to be my first light with a new refractor telescope and an OSC astro camera back in 2021.

For that first test I've only imaged for about 90 minutes. Considering only that exposure time at a focal ratio of f/5.8 that would equate to about only 20 minutes at f/2.8. On the other hand, to capture a similar quality as the 8 hours of exposure with that refractor, I would have to invest about 35 hours of clear skies. That's the difference between two stops.

Anyway, the first light looks like that, and I am still a little bit proud:

Back than I did not expect to create a picture of the Pelican Nebula and similar targets from my home, but this one proved me wrong.