It's been a while since I last imaged,  primarily due to the scorching heat, which made it impossible to use my uncooled camera. However, an exciting opportunity came my way yesterday when I received an invitation from a dear friendto witness his long anticipated first light session at his coastal home. Without hesitation, I gathered my equipment and made my way over.

The weather was well behaved, and the skies were clear.
I quickly set up my gear and aimed my telescope toward the North America Nebula, planning a 2-panel mosaic. While the overall atmospheric conditions were great, the ambient light from nearby homes created an uneven gradient the sky. To counter this, I set up a sequence of 12x 300s exposures in Nina for each panel.
My goal was to capture 1 hour's worth of data for panel 1 and then 1 hour for the second panel, then repeating the process. The Idea was to try to keep  the gradients  somewhat consistent when I later combined the panels. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to make the entire sequence loop, so I set an alarm to remind me to restart it. The first iteration went smoothly. When the alarm rang, I reset and began the second iteration. However, by this point, I was falling asleep was, so I set two alarms and took a short nap. The first alarm woke me up 15 minutes before the sequence was due to end, but I regrettably fell back asleep, completely ignoring the second alarm.

When I finally awoke three hours later, NGC7000 was no longer in view, so I covered my scope and returned to bed. Upon returning home the next day, I decided to stack the images just for fun . To my surprise, the result exceeded my expectations. Considering that I had only captured 2 hours of data per panel and the temperature during most of the exposures ranged between 31-33°C, I was quite pleased with the outcome.

Admittedly, it's a bit noisy, but I'm satisfied with it. After all, it was taken with an uncooled one shot color  camera in a mere 2 hours of imaging! 😉