Featured image of post North American Nebula

North American Nebula

Widefield image of the North American Nebula in Cygnus with a DSLR & cheap zoom lens. Raw stack as FITS available for download.

This image shows a widefield view of the North American and Pelican Nebula are in Cygnus. It was acquired with a 20 EUR Sigma zoom lens at 195mm focal length (stopped down to f/7 for better quality) and a unmodified Nikon D3400. A ZWO Duoband filter was placed in front of the lens. Everything was mounted on a AZ-GTI in EQ mode. I collected data on three nights, some of the Ha data was captured in astronomical twilight.

Processing was done in a special way. Since the duoband filter passes light at Ha and OIII wavelength (12nm and 30nm width) I seperated the RAW data into its individual Bayer matrix components using SplitCFA in PixInsight: Red was assigned to Ha, Green to OIII and Blue also to OIII. The oxygen signal ends up in the blue and green channel because for a typical Bayer matrix, both color channels have a significant overlap. This allows to do a freestyle HOO color combination when processing.

Raw stack from PixInsight can be downloaded here. The zip files contains a stack of the red channel as Ha (132x 300s) and blue/green as OIII (195x300s).

My processed imaged with details can be found on Astrobin. You can read about the this galaxy here on Wikipedia.

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