Revision 3/2023:
I believe the revised edition of this image does a better job of getting deeper into those dark clouds.  And pushing it even further in the stretch tells me it is as much as I am going to get from this data.  There are clearly large regions of dark cloud that are just not going to give me any more structure.  Yet my stretch as presented here must be optimal.  When I set up ArcsinhStretch in preview mode, and hit the auto button, I got zero response!  Never had that.  I actually guessed the predictive stretch perfectly, I guess.  Not that I ever agree with it anyway!  But also zero clipped pixels as well.  This Revision is rescaled to reduce file size, but because it is a two panel mosaic, pixel peeping makes sense to see some of the fine structure and of the unidentified Variable RN discussed below and shown in the Mouseover.

Within the central dark cloud tower that stretches from bottom to top of this frame is a reflection nebula that I find interesting.  My mouseover includes two panels highlighting two things of interest, and this nebula is one of them.  In the top half of the blowup, I show just an expanded view of the nebula from this image.  In the bottom half, is a clipped image of the identical view from the DSS2 color optical survey from Aladin.  I do not know the date that the DSS2 image was acquired, but clearly at that time the reflection nebula was not present.  Clearly the very bright star, which is only dimly seen in the DSS2 image is the culprit.  Not surprisingly, this star is listed as a variable.  It is V2493 Cyg, an Orion type variable.  I have seen this variable nebula on other images of the area posted here on Astrobin.  Trying to figure out when it fired up is rather difficult.  Reason is that the NAN and Pelican really lend themselves to Narrow Band Imaging.  So no surprise most of the images are narrow band.  And NBI does a poor job with reflection nebulae.  If RGB is added to NBI, then, yes this can be seen.  I have found some broad band images back in 2012 that seem not to have the nebula.  But some of these do show that the variable had brightened, but without the nebula.  These nebulae can take time to fully illuminate because the non-infinite speed of light means it can take a year or more to travel the distance to the clouds that need to be illuminated to then reflect the light we see.  I even think I saw an image where the RN was only partially illuminated.  But it was not a very clear image.  (Edit (3/13) with additional info on V2493 Cyg:  I had some time to look further into this reflection nebula and found that it is of interest to at least several research groups, with publications during 2022.  Summary is that this star has had 5 eruptive incidents since 2015.  The star is a young star.  The events appear to be triggered by feeding on a disk of material infalling on occasion.  I sure wish I had some clear skies, it would be cool to follow these events.  This is a variable that has some interesting stuff going on.  If you are interested in following up on this work, double click on Aladin listing, which will send you to the Simbad page or just enter it into the Simbad database.  The references can be found there.)  There are other differences with some other stars in the area disappearing or popping up.  Most all the stars in this small region are atypical.  YSO, emission line star, Harbig-Haro, or someother.  Very cool.

The other Mouse Over sub panel is just an example of what saturation bombing analysis of specific regions looks like.  In Aladin, when you run across these dense square or circular saturated specifics on objects, you can be sure that there is a publication associated with it.  In the Mouse Over, I have listed the reference.  This study has come to an interesting conclusion that the cluster NGC 6997 is in fact situated in front of the NAN and is not associated with NAN.  If true, NGC 6997 is not the driver for the illumination of the NAN.  in fact the star(s) J205551.3+435225 is the said to be the sole illuminating star of the NAN (and presumably also the Pelican).  J205551.3+435225 is a binary, with a type O3.5 and type O8 stars.  The star is behind the dark pillar and visible on my image as a deep red medium bright star just to the east of the "Florida" coast.  It is reddend by absorbtive extinction of the blue light emitted by this 40,000 degree blue giant. 

As I am reprocessing most everything with the newest tools, I wanted to see what I could do with this 2 panel mosaic.  I was happy with what I had produced in the earlier versions, but I know that I had some issues with the background, that led to rather dark regions with the NA nebula itself.  And maybe a puple-ish cast as well.  Same thing with my first attempt at the Cygnus Wall.  These actually are pleasant to look at, and help reveal the foreground reflection components, but I was never sure they were real.  So my goals for this was to get better background correction, and better color correction throughout.  Newer tools and by my learning more, I think has helped in this new version.  Maybe not as dramatic an image as the original.  I decided that I will keep the older versions available, including the boosted gamma one.  But here I was going for "reality" and wanted to concentrate with creating a deeper resolution of details in the vast dark regions that can be seen to dominate many areas of this region.  Also, I wanted truer presentation of the delicate and faint dark silhouetted filaments.  I think I will claim a victory on this one, even if it is not so dramatic a change.  If SPCC is doing its job, then these colors should be the accurate ones.  Only stretch and saturation were done, and never on the stars or starless fields independantly.  Such independant actions can ruin the CC and I fear that star reduction methods actually independantly manipulate the stars from the background.  So... beware!  Also, I am sure I did a better background extraction this time, and found that the very dark regions within "North America" are really not as dark as I presented.  There really are no regions in this field that are free of significant signal from nebulosity.  Getting accurate or "true" backgrounds under such circumstances is difficult with the DBE or ABE tools presented.  And any other.  If there were spectroscopic reference databases available for non-stellar regions of the sky we photograph, it might make the use of BE extraction features better.  Not even considering accuracy, but even for the extraction of external, terrestrial-originated gradients.  Unless someone has imaged this area numerous times, it may not be so easy to know what is gradient or real nebulosity.  In my case, the first time I did this, DBE actually extracted those dark areas too harshly.  But how was I to know?



Original Description:
Here is my attempt at a two panel mosaic of this oft-photographed region of the northern sky.  So I won't add anything to the scientific discord on these objects.  Narrowing the category is the fact that this is a OSC presentation.  Because, that's what I do!  As is typical at my location on the eastern slopes of the coast range here in Oregon, on any clear night in summer, the winds pick up right around dusk.  So I battled gusty winds over the three or so days necessary to collect this data.  Because of this, I threw away probably 30% of my subs outright.  Another 30% or so ended up being segregated and used only to process an RGB layer.  The best (and I was not that fussy) went into a luminance layer for detail processing before also being folded into the remaining RGB layer subs to boost the color signal and depth.

With a C-sized sensor, I got a bit stingy on the overlap at 15%.  Even still,  I ended up sacrificing a bit of the tail feathers off of the pelican.  Wished I would have jogged a little to the right.  But then I probably would not have been happy with the left side of the frame.  So the bird lost out!  Also, once again, I am looking at some tilt related star shape issues in some corners.  But not a fatal issue with such a wide field.  Certainly, I did a significant amount of star reduction on the small stars.  Again, I tried to lose size vs. numbers.  For the bigger stars, well, they are bright and its hard to convey that without saturating the high end and making them look like little dinner plates.  So I let them spread a bit.  In the end, the fact that I did zero noise reduction after merging Luminance with RGB (which in this case was prior to stiching and stretching) tells me that I probably hit the sweet spot on data collection with these 180 sec subs.  (Yeh, I know, you can always collect more!)  For QHY users, this was Mode 3, gain 0 and offset 8.  The deepest fullwell with reasonable read noise, considering.  There is some pretty bright stuff in this field.  As might be expected, as a two panel mosaic, the image withstands a good deal of magnification (star-shape aside) with good detail in the Cygnus Wall and dark clouds.  The quality of the data blows away what I did in my earlier version of

NGC 7000 Cygnus Wall and environs
which is my third ever serious try at Astrophotography.  All mosaic work done in PI.

I am also presenting an after process stretch version as a revision and mouseover for those who prefer a less gloomy presentation.  To me the darker version is more real.  Everyone knows this area, so no need for a plate-solve mouseover.