An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

An → H II region in → Cygnus, also known as NGC 7000, resembling the continent North America in long exposure images. This nebula is lying three degrees from bright star → Deneb and spans on the sky over four times the angular size of the full Moon.
A dark lane separates the North America Nebula from the → Pelican Nebula, actually part of the same enormous cloud some 2,000 → light-years away.

See also: It was first photographed in 1890 by Max Wolf (1863-1932), a German astronomer, who also first called it the North America Nebula because of its resemblance to the Earth’s continent. America, from the feminine of Americus, the Latinized first name of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), who made two trips to the New World as a navigator and claimed to have discovered it. The name America first appeared on a map in 1507 by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, referring to the area now called Brazil; → nebula.