The North America Nebula covers a region more than ten times the area of the full moon, but its surface brightness is low, so normally it cannot be seen with the unaided eye. Binoculars and telescopes with large fields of view (approximately 3°) will show it as a foggy patch of light under sufficiently dark skies.

The portion of the nebula resembling Mexico and Central America is known as the Cygnus Wall. This region exhibits the most concentrated star formation.

At optical wavelengths, the North America Nebula and the Pelican Nebula (IC 5070) appear distinct as they are separated by the silhouette of the dark band of interstellar dust L935. The dark cloud is however transparent to radio waves and infrared radiation, and these wavelengths reveal the central regions of Sh2-117 that are not visible to an ordinary telescope, including many highly luminous stars.

The distances to the North America and Pelican nebulae were controversial, because there are few precise methods for determining how far away an HII region lies. Until 2020, most astronomers accepted a value of 2,000 light years, though estimates ranged from 1,500 to 3,000 light years.

But in 2020, the Gaia astrometry spacecraft measured the distances to 395 stars lying within the HII region, giving the North America and Pelican nebulae a distance of 2,590 light years (795±25 parsecs). The entire HII region Sh2-117 is estimated to be 140 light years across, and the North America nebula stretches 90 light years north to south.

This is a two panel Hubble palette mosaic of the North American and Pelican Nebula captured from my back yard in upstate New York USA. Captured with N.I.N.A., stacked in AstroPixelProcessor, and processed in Pixinsight. It's not quite as wide of fov as I originally had planned. I forgot to save the coordinates of the second panel in NINA so I had to do my best to frame panel 2 after the fact. Oops!

The frames for some unknown reason are showing as Ha but they were:

Sii 30 x 8 minutes

Ha 31 x 8 minutes

Oiii 30 x 8 minutes