This is a framing of an array of emission nebulas in Cygnus: the bright North America Nebula (NGC 7000) at right, and to the right of it, the Pelican
This is a framing of an array of emission nebulas in Cygnus: the bright North America Nebula (NGC 7000) at right, and to the right of it, the Pelican Nebula (IC 5067/8). Those bright nebulas are set amid a complex of fainter nebulosity, notably the Clamshell Nebula at left, as it has become known recently, and catalogued as Sharpless 2-119. At bottom right is the curving Cygnus Arc, aka IC 5068. The small star cluster NGC 7044, yellowed by interstellar dust, is below the Clamshell. The nebulas are marked by lots of structure and radial streaks, perhaps from magnetic fields. In processing, I tried to bring out the faint nebulosity while still maintaining the brightest nebulas as bright, and not compressing the dynamic range too much. And retaining the subtle variations in reds and magentas in the region. But in reality, all the nebulosity here, other than the North America and Pelican Nebulas, is faint. The long exposures through a filter and later processing was required to bring them out. This is a blend of filtered images (for the nebulosity) and unfiltered images (contributing the naturally-coloured stars), all taken with the Sharpstar 61EDPHIII apo refractor with its Reducer/Flattener at and with the astro-modified (by ) Canon EOS R camera. The filtered set is a stack of 12 images through an IDAS NBZ dual narrowband filter, for 8 minutes each at ISO 3200. The unfiltered set is a stack of 15 images taken a week later (due to clouds intervening on the first night) at ISO 800 for 6 minutes each. So this was a total of ~3 hours of exposure, still short by today's standards. All were autoguided and inter-frame dithered with the Lacerta MGENIII stand-alone autoguider. No darks or LENR employed on these fairly warm August nights. All stacked, aligned and blended in Photoshop CC. Luminosity masks created with Lumenzia, mostly applied to a starless filtered layer created with RC-Astro StarXTerminator, brought out the faint nebulosity. As did an a
Size: 6700px × 4450px
Photo credit: © Alan Dyer / VWPics / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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