Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory Photo Ambassador and member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical “Skyscapes” that connect both Earth and the night sky.
The image features a dark region of space found between the Pelican Nebula and the Cygnus Wall, which are both part of the North America Nebula in the constellation Cygnus.
This region is photographed often, especially because of the well-known North American nebula NGC 7000 where this region of the sky is embedded. The nebula gets its name from the fact that it resembles the North American continent.
But few images – I only found half a dozen in Astrobin prior to this, for reference – offer a real portrait of the “hidden” Dragon in all its glory. I tried to emphasize this dragon-like shape in my framing of this photograph, which I have named the “Great Dragon of Pelican.”
The dark nebula LDN 935, which resembles the figure of a Chinese Dragon, is known as the “Gulf of Mexico” – which is more easy to understand when seeing it from certain angles that make it resemble its geographic counterpart. This is a region where the obscured interstellar dust lanes absorb and scatter the light, darkening the space between both nebulas.
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The greenish right edge reveals the bright interesting area known as the Cygnus Wall, a true stellar nursery of newly formed stars. The wall is eroded and illuminated by bright young stars, partially not visible for being occulted behind the dust they have just created.
On the left side of the dust shines the Pelican Nebula, an evolving cloud of gas and star formation. The light from young energetic stars is slowly transforming the cold gas into hot gas, revealing the advancing boundary between both, known as the ionization front. This front is visible on the image as a bright orange-reddish region, with intricate filaments of cold gas visible along the front.
I have also included a starless image to help viewers appreciate only the nebulosity in the image.
Below is another annotated version produced with PixInsight script based on several known astronomical catalogues that can help viewers identify the main objects in the image.
This image represents ten total hours of observation and was captured from the Dark Sky Alqueva observatory in Portugal, in different wavelengths between Ha, OIII and RGB light, using the Anit-Halo PRO Dual-Band 3nm and a Poseidon-C Pro Camera from Player One Astronomy.
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