North American Nebula

The North American Nebula is located in the Cygnus Constellation and is also known as NGC 7000. Its a pretty easy target to find as Deneb is located on one edge of the nebula. It was more a “test” night as it was first light for the SVBony Ha 7nm filter (although I have yet to test this claim scientifically in full).

My image is made up of a combination of RGB and Ha (Hydrogen Alpha) channel data. The RGB portion was 18 subs of 60 seconds at ISO 2500 as I was still testing ISO performance to noise (Hint: its looking like the optimal setting is 800).

The Ha data however was a bit tricky as it is made up a few different exposure times from 3 seconds to 10 minutes at various ISO settings as I was dialing in the ideal settings. The best results coming from ISO 2500 and 10 minutes. In the future though 20 minutes and ISO 800 likely the sweat spot for exposure.

Overall there is ~45 minutes of data in this image between RGB and Ha.

In the end I added the Ha to the Red Channel Data to improve the overall SNR ratio to get the final image, perhaps later I’ll look at HaRGB options however given the changes in the camera settings I think I’ll try that on another target.

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