APOD: North America and the Pelican (2013 Sep 03)

[APOD Robot]

North America and the Pelican

Explanation: Here lie familiar shapes in unfamiliar locations. On the left is an emission nebula cataloged as NGC 7000, famous partly because it resembles our fair planet's continent of North America. The emission region to the right of the North America Nebula is IC 5070, also known for its suggestive outlines as the Pelican Nebula. Separated by a dark cloud of obscuring dust, the two bright nebulae are about 1,500 light-years away. At that distance, the 4 degree wide field of view spans 100 light-years. This spectacular cosmic portrait combines narrow band images to highlight bright ionization fronts with fine details of dark, dusty forms in silhouette. Emission from atomic hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen is captured in the narrow band data. These nebulae can be seen with binoculars from a dark location. Look northeast of bright star Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan.

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[Ann]

APOD Robot wrote:
This spectacular cosmic portrait combines narrow band images to highlight bright ionization fronts with fine details of dark, dusty forms in silhouette. Emission from atomic hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen is captured in the narrow band data.

Scott Rosen wrote:
This image combines my Hydrogen Alpha data with my RGB Color data to form an HaRGB version of this beautiful region.

This is a lovely image, Scott!

Ann

[Boomer12k]

Really nice picture of an interesting area...

:---[===] *

[orin stepanek]

Broken links? obscuring dust, &This spectacular cosmic portrait

[owlice]

Thanks, Orin! Otto apparently slipped a couple of bits! The links weren't formed correctly. I've fixed them; thanks for pointing out they didn't work!

[Beyond]

Well that's a bit strange. All the links worked for me shortly after Otto posted them.

[owlice]

Beyond, the links on the APOD page were correct (or at least, were when I checked them a bit ago); did you click Otto's links, or the links on the APOD page?

[Beyond]

The links in the explanation. Now you've got me . What do you mean by Otto's links

:EDIT: It just dawned on me Otto's links are the discussion thread (Bridge) links. I clicked the APOD links. In the past, i found that if one set of links had broken ones, the other set had the same thing, so I've never thought of them as two separate things.

[orin stepanek]

Thanks owlice: you know, I think I remember driving through that dust storm an another APOD!

[geckzilla]

Yes, Otto gets confused when an editor puts spaces before the http. He's an easily confused bot. Like:

Code: Select all

<a href=" http://www.astronomersdoitinthedark.com/index.php?c=145&p=510">

[Ann]

As I pointed out in my post early this morning, part of today's caption in faulty. Scott Rosen's image is not a narrow-band image, as he himself pointed out in this link.

Scott Rosen's lovely image is an RGB image with extra Ha. This, by the way, is obvious from the colors of the image. A narrow band image just wouldn't look the way Scott Rosen's image does. Instead it might look something like this or something like this. An RGB image of the North America and Pelican nebulae would, instead, look something like this - or, it would look like Scott Rosen's image!

So how about changing the "narrow-band" part of the caption?

Ann

[Steve D]

I suggest the name Ursula for the dark mass between the North America and Pelican, after the villainess from The Little Mermaid.

[bkinmonth]

Interestingly, I made a grilled cheese sandwich this afternoon, and when I flipped it, lo and behold!, an equally impressive image of North America. If you squint and hold it up to the light wrong, that is. I'll be posting it for sale on Ebay later...

[Beyond]

No doubt it will be eaten up in short order

[Joe Stieber]

Another little boo-boo. The APOD text says the nebulae are northeast of Deneb while the photographer's web page says they're west of Deneb. Actually, they are approximately east-southeast of Deneb.

Regardless, it's a fine picture!

Joe

[Chris Peterson]

Another little boo-boo. The APOD text says the nebulae are northeast of Deneb while the photographer's web page says they're west of Deneb. Actually, they are approximately east-southeast of Deneb.

This region is so large compared with the distance to Deneb that parts of it are actually northeast, and parts are southeast. Personally, I'd say the region in the image is just east of Debeb, and leave it at that.