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| Pelican Nebula | ||||||||||||||||||
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| The long beak of the Pelican Nebula looks more like the head of a prehistoric Pterydactyl than the head of a bird. The eye is ghostly dark, but the nearby bright star hints of a displaced eyeball. The Pelican Nebula is part of a huge cloud of hydrogen gas, termed an H-II region by astronomers, illuminated by a nearby star. Like other H-II regions, the hydrogen gas is excited by the stellar energy, and then emits its own light at the characteristic red wavelength of hydrogen. Located at a distance of 1500 light-years in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan, the Pelican Nebula is separated from the adjacent larger North American Nebula by a broad band of light-absorbing dark clouds. This image combined 84 Luminance images with a red filter, with 20 red, 20 green, and 28 blue one-minute images, for a total imaging time of 2 hours 32 minutes. An ST10XME camera was used through a 4 inch refractor. |
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| Music: Peanuts Theme | ||||||||||||||||||
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