Hello all!
I normally drive long distances to find a nice dark site to carry out my astro imaging. One of the reasons is that I have a solid group of friends that join up and our mini star parties can range from 2 or 3 up to 6 or 7 friends attending. This is difficult to do all the time, due to work commitments, family, and myriad of other fun things to pursue.
This is my first try at carrying out a semi-automated imaging session in the backyard: meridian flip, recalibration of auto-guiding, and ~ 5 hours of integration. While I know that there are folks with > 20 hours on a single target on this site, my summer nights are quite short and not much astronomical dark can be had until August. Hence this experiment.
This sets a couple of personal records:
-longest integration
-shortest drive to set up (0 km).
-most difficult processing
From Sky Safari: "The North America Nebula and the nearby Pelican Nebula, (IC 5070) are in fact parts of the same interstellar cloud of ionized hydrogen. Between the Earth and the nebula complex lies a band of interstellar dust that absorbs the light of the stars and nebulae behind it, and is thereby responsible for the shape as we see it."
"The distance to the nebula complex is not precisely known, nor is the star responsible for ionizing the hydrogen so that it emits light. If the star inducing the ionization is Deneb, as some sources say, the nebula complex would be about 1800 light years distant, and its absolute size would be about 100 light years."
I like the mini-walls on either side of the nebula... very interesting to accentuate while processing.
Imaged with a L-eNhance filter and a OSC, thus Ha, Hb and OIII bands were picked up.
Anyway, here is NGC 7000- thank you for looking.
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