The Pelican Nebula in Smokey Skies

The Pelican Nebula: Taken under Michigan skies in July, 2021.

With six hours of data on the Pelican Nebula I figured I would have enough to pull out a vibrant and sharp-featured photo to show. However, it turns out since we have wildfire smoke dumping over Michigan skies this past month, pollutants are scattering the faint light of deep sky targets while amplifying light pollution.

The nebulous region where the Pelican nebula resides in is a large swath of sky full of Hydrogen gasses (H-II) which emit in a narrow band of red wavelength light. It turns out the particles making up this smoke pollution end up scattering the red wavelengths much worse than others.

Hopefully you can still make out the pelican shape in this object.