The mountain steepens…

Although probably not the most mature decision, I couldn’t let the serendipitous alignment of crystal clear skies, cool weather, a new moon, and a weekend pass without maximizing the exploitation of said gooderies. I drove back to Huntsville last night and imaged the Cygnus region again. Specifically, it was NGC 7000, the North American Nebula and it was all wide-field. I had this grand plan to reconfigure the CCD with a directly attached plate to mount it with my fastest lens, the EF 85mm f/1.2L, and bin the narrowband exposures for some crazy signal to noise ratios. However, I had conveniently forgotten that the 85L focuser required power and could not be manually focused. Fortunately, I brought a back-up lens and albeit less sharp, the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS on the wide end was close to my desired field of view. I started out with a 2×2 binned Hydrogen Alpha, Sulfur II, and Oxygen III run and switched to a non-binned Luminance run after the meridian transit without consideration for the added difficulty of integration or the lack of need for Lum data when integrating NB. This is how we learn. Anyhoo, I didn’t get home until 6am and only got a couple of hours of sleep before I needed to be up and functional. It took some doing, but I managed to pull together a “first pass” at this data. I need to digest a little tribal knowledge before making another attempt. This is a lot more complex than I anticipated. 

NGC 7000
The North American Nebula