Image 1: North America Nebula by Calvin Klatt, 2024-10
This image took me a VERY long time to produce: Mostly because of some buggy software that I am using. I also wanted to develop a better processing methodology and that took time. Some data was from the end of September this year (Narrowband H Alpha) but some was from 2021 (RGB).
The North America Nebula (NGC7000), in the constellation Cygnus, is large (several degrees across) but quite faint. It was difficult for Herschel in 1829 and he described it as a "faint, most extremely large, diffuse nebulosity.” By 1890 an astronomer had a good enough view of it to note the shape and give it this name. 2,590 light years away, the North America Nebula stretches 90 light years north to south. It is part of an even bigger region of gasses.
The nebula is a combination of glowing red emission AND dark black bands of dust that obscure everything behind. This image captures the black bands quite well, or at least my high-resolution version does.
This image was captured using the ZWO ASI6200MC camera (RBG, 83 minutes) and the ZWO ASI6200MM camera (narrowband H-Alpha, 78 minutes). Telescope was the RASA11 on the CEM70 mount, from the Lac Teeples observatory. The stars and nebula were separated into two files. The nebula had very bad rings from where the stars had been. The nebula was cleaned up in Photoshop to remove the optical corruption, leaving the actual nebulosity in place.
The stars exhibited the effect of sensor tilt. At the far right (Arctic on the continent) the stars were stubby lines rather than circles. This was partially cleaned up by adding a second star field overlay and rotating it slightly ("darken only" mode) about the point of sharpest stars.
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