At last.... I can see the Pelican.....

[Craney]

When I say 'see'  .... I mean visualise the shape of the bird.  It has never sprung out at me before as a bird of any form.

I suppose the North American Nebula just grabs the attention in this region. It is a great one to show friends. It is pretty much geographically accurate. The poor ol'Pelican hangs in there, floating around off the 'Florida' coast.

I did an hours worth of imaging to get the picture (  20x60s SHO with Samyang 135mm and Atik 414ex)  and processed it in Astro-Pixel-Processor.    As I was tweaking the values I suddenly got the shape and it all made sense.   

 

although looking again, it could be a Moose !!!!!

[Elp]

Great image.

Looking at just the LHS it looks just like a pigeon. With the RHS it looks more like a toucan.

[Felias]

It will always be a pterodactyl to me...

[Craney]

12 minutes ago, Felias said:

It will always be a pterodactyl to me...

Yep... I can see that straight away.

[Knight of Clear Skies]

It's a bit like the Man in the Moon, once you see it you can't un-see it.

(By the way, the NA & Pelican are actually one HII region obscured by an intervening dust cloud. The ionizing source is a very hot star hiding behind the dust, barely visible at optical wavelengths.)

[Felias]

57 minutes ago, Knight of Clear Skies said:

It's a bit like the Man in the Moon, once you see it you can't un-see it.

(By the way, the NA & Pelican are actually one HII region obscured by an intervening dust cloud. The ionizing source is a very hot star hiding behind the dust, barely visible at optical wavelengths.)

The star responsible (thought there may be more than one, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.3229.pdf ) was found by Fernando Comerón and Anna Pasquali in 2004 (full paper: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2005/05/aa1788.pdf   ) It's very technical, but there is a more readable retelling of their detective work here: https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/sacred-space-astronomy/illuminating-north-america-or-anna-and-fernando-find-a-star/ -Worth reading!

[MartinB]

Regardless of the species of bird it is an excellent image!