NGC 7000 North America nebula and IC5070 Pelican nebula in Ha

At long last I've finished this mosaic, it consists of 6 frames each made up of 11 x 1200 sub exposures giving a total of 22 hours. Interestingly, the last frame at top right was taken late September in what has been described as an Indian Summer, in the early to late evening the ambient air temperature was 20° Celsius. I was unable to cool the QSI camera down to -20°C and had to make do at -15°C.

This final image is about 27.5 million pixels and 52.3 Mb in size.

They are one or two interesting features in this area of sky, the close crops below detail a few of them. Click on each image for an enlarged view. The first shows on the left an area I call the Ferret, then the dark oval shape of the Pelican's eye and finally on the right, at the end of that elephant's trunk like extension, is the Herbig Haro object 555.

The image below shows one of Barnard's Dark nebula, B355, that chevron shaped object left of centre. In his book, A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, E. E. Barnard passes comment on this "...is a dark, V-shaped spot (B355), pointing west, about 5' in length. This is perhaps an opening in the nebulosity".

Finally this last one I find interesting, it's at the bottom edge and shows the gorgeous tendrils of dark nebulae.

Those of you who have paid frequent visits in the past may know that I have problems with trains running on the East coast mainline at the bottom of my garden. The house vibrates and the mount vibrates. About 12 months ago I read in the news that a government minister stated that a further 20 extra trains a day would be using the line. Well it appears that is now the case. I'm losing sub after sub due to the increased frequency of rail traffic, consequently, I'm unable to post images as often as I would like. In fact it did cross my mind on more than one occasion to sell my camera kit and try to do some visual work. However, I've decided to carry on regardless and may try reduced sub exposures times. I'm also wondering if an active optic unit will help.

Tek care
Dave

P.S. I now have the OIII and SII data to get, starting next year.