Exposures: 3 hours of Ha and 5 hrs of SII (in 15-minute subexposures) for a total of 8 hours imaged over 3 nights.
Also known as the Pelican nebula, IC 5070 is an active mix of star formation and evolving gas clouds. The light from young energetic stars is slowly cooling hydrogen and other gases causing an ionization front to gradually advance outward. Particularly dense filaments of cold gas remain, and among these are found two jets emitted from what are known as Herbig-Haro objects. Such a jet can be seen atop the dark finger protruding from the right side of the gas cloud.
This is a bicolor Image consisting of Ha and SII. Inspection of 2 hours of OIII revealed very weak and noisy data so it was discarded. Color mapped by assigning SII to red and Ha to both green and blue.
Field of View =50 x 31 arc minutes
1,800 light years away
Click here for version with star diffraction spikes
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