NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 7, 2026 turns its lens on IC 5070, better known as the Pelican Nebula, captured in a striking 25-hour deep exposure by astrophotographer Mark Killion from Utah, USA. The image reveals in exquisite detail why this nebula draws so much scientific attention: it’s not just a pretty shape in the sky, it’s a region actively rewriting itself.

A Bird Divided From a Continent

The Pelican Nebula sits right next to the better-known North America Nebula, separated from it by a molecular cloud thick with dark, obscuring dust. Together, both nebulae are part of the same vast star-forming complex roughly 1,500 light-years from Earth , almost as close to us as the famous Orion Nebula. The Pelican earns its name from the silhouette its bright and dark regions trace out, resembling the bird’s head and beak.

Cold Gas Turning Hot

What makes the Pelican such a popular target for study is that it’s caught mid-transformation. Young, energetic stars embedded in the nebula are pouring out radiation that slowly converts the surrounding cold gas into hot, ionized gas. The advancing boundary between these two states, called an ionization front, is visible as a bright orange glow in the upper right of the image. Meanwhile, particularly dense “tentacles” of cold gas still cling on, resisting the transformation for now.

This isn’t a static portrait, it’s a snapshot of an ongoing process. Millions of years from now, as the balance between stars, gas, and dust continues to shift, the region bounded by the dark nebula LDN 935 may no longer resemble a pelican at all. What we’re seeing today is essentially a single frame from an extremely slow cosmic film.

Why It’s Worth a Second Look

Star-forming regions like the Pelican Nebula are natural laboratories for understanding how radiation from young stars shapes the gas clouds around them, the same basic physics that governed the environment our own Sun was born into billions of years ago. Deep amateur exposures like this one, built up over dozens of hours, are increasingly able to reveal fine structural detail once reserved for professional observatories.

• IC 5070, the Pelican Nebula, lies about 1,500 light-years away, part of the same star-forming complex as the North America Nebula.
• Radiation from young, hot stars is converting cold gas to hot ionized gas along a visible “ionization front.”
• Dense pockets of cold gas remain, resisting the transformation for now.
• Over millions of years, the nebula’s shape — and its resemblance to a pelican — will change entirely.

Original source: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, September 7, 2026 — “The Pelican Nebula in Gas, Dust, and Stars” Image Credit & Copyright: Mark Killion