Five weeks and counting with only cloudy skies,so again I dipped into the amazing data from the Moana Project, provided free and open source to anyone courtesy of @blackrig !!!

Nebula Description
While it is only a small part of the North American Nebula NGC700, the turbulent Cygnus Wall is still huge, 20 light-years long, and the most concentrated area of star formation in NGC7000. From bottom left to upper right, as we follow along with the yellows, oranges and reds of the predominant SII and Ha that make up the Wall, we travel from Central America to Mexico. The Pacific Ocean lies to the left, with the Gulf of Mexico to the right, appropriately enough both dominated by the teal colors of OIII. 

Measurements in 2020 from the Gaia spacecraft finally accurately determined the distance to the stars in the nebula at  2600 light-years, farther out than previous estimates. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aba19a

A long-standing puzzle for this huge HII complex (NGC7000 and IC5070, the Pelican Nebula), was finding the excitation source that drives the fluorescent emission of the complex. It was clear from geometry that the star must be somewhere behind Lynds L935, see the yellow circle below between the Cygnus Wall on the left and the Pelican Nebula on the right, which is taken from this article: https://www.caha.es/newsletter/news05b/Comeron/ngc7000.html

In that article they find that the very hot (40,000 K) and very bright O5V star J205551.3+43522 (attenuated to our view, as it is behind the nebula) is likely the sole driving force for the entire HII complex. The remaining mystery is that the OV5 classification would indicate a 60 solar mass star. However, such massive stars are rarely birthed alone, yet there are no associated stars nearby, nor does it appear to be a rogue interloper either.



Moana Project Data is so kindly provided by Blackrig, open for anyone to process. Again, a huge big shoutout to Blackrig for this truly awesome dataset! For those that want to try it, this data and more is here: https://erellaz.com/moana/open-datasets/

DIY 250 mm/1325mm/f5.6 Newtonian Astrograph
ASI1600MM Camera
AP1100 GTO Mount
Location: DSO Fort Davis, Texas
The full dataset was: SII at 91 x 5m = 295 m, Ha at 99 x 5 m = 495 m, and OIII at 92 x 5 m = 460 m.

My Processing 

• I calibrated, registered, and stacked all images using DeepSkyStacker.

Most of my processing was done in Startools. 

• After a slight crop, I did a background Wipe, a Photographic Film Development Emulation with gamma = 1.5, a very small 1.3 px deconvolution, and an SHO color palette of 40SII+60Ha,70Ha+30OIII,100OIII.
• For the stars I did a separate image process using just HOO, since there was no RGB data set, this enabled me to get more realistic stars than SHO would provide.

Final processing was done in Photoshop.

• I separated the nebulosity from the stars in both processed images using StarXterminator.
• I used APF-R multiscale unsharp mask (used by NASA) on the nebulosity to reduce blurriness on the SHO nebulosity layer. However, I did not want this to affect the color, so the sharpened image was added as a luminosity layer, while the original unsharpened nebulosity provided the color. For both nebulosity and stars I made separate color and levels adjustment tweaks.
• Then I did separate runs of NoiseXterminator on each of the three layers, as each layer needed different treatment.
• I add the star layer back into the nebula layer with screen mode.