K3's Astronomy - Deep Sky
"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, what is Man that You are mindful of him?" -- Psalm 8:3,4

NGC7000 - The North America Nebula

Click the image to see full size (7.54"/pixel).

NGC7000 - The North America Nebula, 06.10.2004 (22:07 -23:44 UT)
Resolution: 9.43 arcsec/pixel
Object altitude: 53° - 38°
Camera: SAC8 + 0.6x Mogg focal reducer
Telescope: 80mm F5 Skywatcher refractor
Result focal ratio: F3
Filters: Astronomik H-alpha
Exposure: 72x14s (gain 100%, Hi-Res, Amp Off), mosaic of 4 frames
Capturing: K3CCDTools 2
Processing: K3CCDTools 2, Loreal, iMerge, Corel PhotoPaint
Seeing: lim.magnitude for naked eye 4.2, medium transparency
Conditions: temperature 10.2°C, 62% humidity

Astronomik H-alpha filter showed perfect performance. You can compare the photos taken before - without H-alpha filter.

Processing:
1, Stacked by K3CCDTools 2 with 16-bit DF (135x14s) and artificial FF
2, Histogram stretching and gamma 2.2 in K3CCDTools
3, Rotation (to eliminate wrong polar alignment) in K3APEX
3, Mosaic from 4 result frames created in iMerge
4, "black ghost" on the right side of bright stars were removed by Loreal
5, Final resizing, contrast enhancement and adaptive unsharp mask Corel PhotoPaint.


Colorized version created from the above picture:
1, Grayscale image converted to RGB
2, G and B layers cleared - the result is RGB red colored picture
3, Gamma 2.40 applied to RGB red
4, Grayscale and RGB red version are layered in PhotoPaint and used overlay merge mode

Detail of bottom part of nebula - one of the 4 frames creating the above mosaic
Exposure: 72x14s (gain 100%, Hi-Res, Amp Off)
Resolution: 6.50 arcsec/pixel
Processed by K3APEX (Digital Development filter).

Click the image to see full size (16.45"/pixel).
NGC7000 - The North America Nebula, 17.09.2004 (23:29 -00:10 UT)
Resolution: 27.88 arcsec/pixel
Camera: SAC8 + 0.6x Mogg focal reducer
Telescope: 80mm F5 Skywatcher refractor
Result focal ratio: F3
Exposure: 30x02s (gain 100%, binned, Amp Off), mosaic of 12 frames
Capturing: K3CCDTools 2
Processing: K3CCDTools 2, Loreal, iMerge, Corel PhotoPaint
Seeing: lim.magnitude for naked eye 4.5, good transparency
Conditions: temperature 10.2°C, 62% humidity

Processing:
1. Stacked by K3CCDTools 2 with DF and artificial FF
2, 12 result frames were processed by Loreal
3, Mosaic created in iMerge
4, Horizontal bands (caused by SAC8 camera) were supressed by processing in Corel PhotoPaint
5, Final histogram tweaking and gamma 0.85 in Corel PhotoPaint. Then the whole mosaic was resized to 24% and 40% for web

Note: No filters were used. The object is much better visible if Hydrogen alfa filter is used.

This is artificially colorized version of the above picture. Colorization was done in Corel PhotoPaint.

Click the image to see the full 100% size (6.50"/pixel).
"Mexico" part of above NGC7000. The part of the result mosaic was resized to 50% (13.16"/pixel)

Click the image to see full size (23.1"/pixel).
Click
here to see the image with logarithmic brightness scale.
NGC7000 - The North America Nebula, 9.12.2001 (19:30 -19:55 UT)
Resolution: 46.2 arcsec/pixel
Camera: Vesta 675SC piggyback at 8" Europa, GEM1
Objective: 2/50 Flexon
Exposure: 25x60s (gain 0%), 10xDF
Seeing: lim.magnitude for naked eye 4.5

The nebula with North America shape.
Gain of webcam was set to 0% to suppress the noise of camera. The noise usually affect the quality of image, because the compression of data is wasted for compressing the noise and star images are poor. Such large field photo contains a lot of stars, that means it contains a lot of information to be compressed.


Click the image to see more processing results.
NGC7000 - The North America Nebula, 10.11.2001 (21:31 - 21:42 UT)
Resolution: 46.2 arcsec/pixel
Camera: Vesta 675SC piggyback at 8" Europa, GEM1
Objective: 2/50 Flexon
Exposure: 40x16s (gain 80%), 40xDF
Seeing: lim.magnitude for naked eye 4.5

The nebula with North America shape. Not the whole nebula is visible in the photo. The brightest star on the right side is Deneb (a Cygni).

Back to Messier Catalog


Computer generated images, real images, drawings and texts are property of the author and may not be reproduced or used without permission of author.


Home

Last Update: 09.10.2004