The Pelican Nebula is an ionized hydrogen gas cloud that is part of a much larger molecular cloud including the famous North American Nebula, NGC 7000. The Pelican Nebula resembles its namesake when viewed or imaged with small telescopes at wider fields of view. Both the Pelican and the North American Nebuae lie in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the swan. The Pelican is near the very bright star Deneb, the Arabic word for tail [of the swan]. The above image is a small part of the Pelican Nebula, designated IC 5067. It covers only part of the face and neck of the swan representation. IC 5067 is one of the best examples of a stellar nursery containing hundreds of embryonic and recently born stars.

The IC in IC 5067 refers to the Index Catalog of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars published by John Dreyer in 1895 as a 5386 object supplement to his New General Catalog (NGC) of 7840 objects compiled in 1888. IC 5067 contains a relatively high concentration of Herbig-Haro Objects, abbreviated HH, and Molecular Hydrogen emission-line Objects, abbreviated MHO. HH objects are bright patches of nebulosity where newborn stars have emerged. These young stars create the bright nebulosity by ejecting narrow jets of ionized gas from their rotational axis into nearby clouds of gas and dust at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second. Often the young star is hidden from view visually due to opaque clouds of gas and dust but is visible in infrared or radio wavelengths of light. These infrared counterparts to the HH objects received the designation MHO in 2009 by the International Astronomical Union. Hovering over the image above shows insets of MHO, HH objects, as well as a few dark nebulae regions.

Until recently, distances to the Pelican Nebula and North American Nebula were estimated to be a wide range of about 1500-3000 light years in distance. This was due to the imprecise methods of measuring distances to HII regions. However, in 2020, for the first time, the Gaia spacecraft accurately measured the distance to both nebulae to be 2590 light years, giving them a size of 140 by 90 light years.

While in the image above, star brightness has been subdued to better see the nebulous areas, in the image below, stars have been completely removed. Hovering over the image brings those removed stars back!