Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  50 alf Cyg  ·  51 Cyg  ·  55 Cyg  ·  56 Cyg  ·  57 Cyg  ·  59 f01 Cyg  ·  60 Cyg  ·  62 ksi Cyg  ·  63 f02 Cyg  ·  B346  ·  B348  ·  B349  ·  B350  ·  B351  ·  B352  ·  B353  ·  B355  ·  B356  ·  B361  ·  Deneb  ·  IC 1369  ·  IC 5068  ·  IC 5070  ·  IC 5076  ·  NGC 6991  ·  NGC 6996  ·  NGC 6997  ·  NGC 7000  ·  NGC 7026  ·  NGC 7039  ·  And 38 more.
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NGC 7000 North America Nebula #5, Molly Wakeling
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NGC 7000 North America Nebula #5

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NGC 7000 North America Nebula #5, Molly Wakeling
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 7000 North America Nebula #5

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Another image from my recent dark-sky camping trip up into the Tahoe National Forest -- the North America Nebula!

My original plan had been to pair my ZWO ASI294MC Pro color astro cam with my Rokinon 135mm lens, but alas, I forgot the adapter at home. So instead, I went "old school" and threw my DSLR onto the lens! My Nikon D5300, specifically. With the new, sturdier base I got for the Star Adventurer, I had hoped that my polar alignment would hold better, but the image ended up drifting pretty far during the night, resulting in it coming out best framed the way it is here. Nonetheless, having it lower in the frame allowed me to see some of the unnamed glowing hydrogen regions up above it.

The North America Nebula, cataloged as NGC 7000, is a large emission nebula up in the constellation Cygnus, which is a summertime constellation that I woke up in the middle of the night to re-point the camera at after about 1:30 AM. You can see how it kind of resembles the United States, with the Great Lakes being a dark region. It is huge on the sky, covering an area spanning about 12 full Moons in a 4x3 grid. It lies about 2,500 lightyears away from Earth, making it the monstrous size of 140x90 lightyears. The star center-right in the image is the bright and familiar Deneb.

In keeping with the "old school" theme, I also wound up having to stack it in DeepSkyStacker, of all things -- it has a "mosaic" stacking mode that will let you stack frames that are slightly offset from each other into one long unified image, which there doesn't seem to be a non-terrible way to do in PixInsight. I wasn't even sure I still had DSS installed!

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NGC 7000 North America Nebula #5, Molly Wakeling