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The Cygnus Wall, Jay Ballauer

The Cygnus Wall

Link: https://www.allaboutastro.com/the-cygnus-wall.html

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

​Observatory: The Conley Observatory at Comanche Springs Astronomy Campus (Three Rivers Foundation) near Crowell, Texas

Date: December 11 to 15, 2018

Telescope: ​12" RCOS Ritchey-Chretien

Camera: FLI Proline PL-16803

Filters: Astrodon Spectral Band 3nm

​Exposure Info: 15 x 20 minutes of H-alpha; 8 x 20 minutes of OIII; and 6 x 20 minutes of SII. All exposures are unbinned.

​

Total Exposure Time: 9 hours, 40 minutes

About this image:

Here is the Cygnus Wall within the emission nebula, NGC 7000, the North America Nebula. What you see here is the “Mexican coast,” where north would be left in this orientation. The blue "water" would be the Gulf of Mexico.

Emission nebula, like this complex, represent star forming regions, where hydrogen, among other gases, is available for new stars to be born. Hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur glow in the dark at specific wavelengths, triggered by neighboring, hot young stars ”ionizing” the gases. These images are produced by taking images through specific filters to pass their narrow spectral bands to the sensor. Once collected, the individual channels can be mapped to traditional RGB color channels to produce a variety of color "palettes."

This image is the traditional "Hubble" Palette, made popular by the space telescope. It mixes SII to RED, H-Alpha to GREEN, and OIII to BLUE, all at 100%. Typically, the OIII (Oxygen) and SII (Sulfur) channels are, by far, the weakest of the data; therefore, they are typically much worse in signal/noise ratio. To produce a clean image, one can either image for multiple HOURS on the oxygen and sulfur OR they can simply use the H-Alpha (hydrogen) as the luminance component for the image. I did the latter, which makes this an Ha/SII/Ha/OIII image.

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The Cygnus Wall, Jay Ballauer
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