North America Nebula (NGC7000)


(Updated Dec. 2017)

The very bright star, Deneb, which is the tail of the swan in the constellation Cygnus, is just outside the field of view in this image.  The colors are “false”, as is usually the case with narrowband images, but perhaps especially so here, since the real color would be predominantly red because there is so much hydrogen.  Instead, the H-a channel was used as luminence (defining the brightness of each pixel), while the S-2 channel is assigned to red and the O-3 channel to both blue and green.

The image was captured at Wa-chur-ed Observatory in June of 2016.

Scope: WO Star71 at f/4.9
Mount: AP Mach1
Camera: QSI 683 at –20C
Exposure: 12 x 900s H-a, 5 x 1800s O-3, 4 x 1800s S-2  (7 hrs 30 mins total)


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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