I’ve taken the North America Nebula two times and both times were with my Redcat 51 where I captured the enormousness of the nebula at a mere 250mm. This time I wanted to do something different-capture a close-up of the section known as the Cygnus Wall. The Cygnus Wall is a turbulent star formation area within the North America Nebula. It’s basically the tiny little part that would be Florida in North America.
This was also the first time I was capturing the North America Nebula in mono. My previous 2 photos here and here were taken with a color camera. The former taken with the ASI533MC and the latter taken with my Fujifilm X camera.
Capturing the Cygnus Wall
This time there were many differences in my capturing technique. It was taken with my Astro-Tech AT115EDT at 644mm using the Astro-Tech .8x reducer on the telescope and as mentioned above, it was taken using a mono camera with filters for Ha, Sii, Oiii, and RGB (for the stars). It was also processed in Pixinsight. I believe my previous attempts were unfortunately processed in Photoshop from the start (even the stretching part!).
For this photo of the Cygnus Wall, there was roughly 11 hours taken this time around. You can see the detailed breakdown of filters on my Astrobin page.
Processing the Cygnus Wall in Pixinsight
I had to do a large amount of cropping to make this work. My camera shoots at 3008×3008, but this image came down to 2400×2400 because a group of subs that were shot were severely rotated. That happens sometimes even when you try to avoid it as I did in this case.
Despite the setback, I think this capture of the Cygnus Wall came out pretty good. Other than that, I didn’t do anything that was crazy different from my normal Pixinsight process. The only thing that varies from other photos is the amount of any process that I apply. That’s all judgement and it’s a skill that every astrophotographer (and photographer) needs to learn. I personally don’t like adding a lot of contrast in my images although many people think contrast is king. Astrophotography deals with a limited number of colors and adding contrast sometimes limits some of the amazing parts of the nebula including transparency, gases, etc.
Conclusion
This was a new experience than how I had taken the North America Nebula in in the past. It was by far my most in-depth capture. The summer is a beautiful season for astrophotography and Cygnus is an amazing summer constellation. There are so many ways to capture the beauty of it and I look forward to shooting Cygnus and the Cygnus Wall for many summers to come.
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