The North America and Pelican Nebula Mosaic by Martin Błna
Name of the object
The North America Nebula, The Pelican Nebula
Catalogue numbers
NGC7000, IC5067, IC5070
Distance from the Earth
2,200 ± 100 ly
Constellation
Cygnus
About object(from Wikipedia):
The North America Nebula (NGC 7000 or Caldwell 20) is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, close to Deneb (the tail of the swan and its brightest star). The remarkable shape of the emission nebula resembles that of the continent of North America, complete with a prominent Gulf of Mexico. It is sometimes incorrectly called the "North American Nebula".
The Pelican Nebula (also known as IC5070 and IC5067) is an H II region associated with the North America Nebula in the constellation Cygnus. The nebula resembles a pelican in shape, hence the name. The Pelican Nebula is a large area of emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan), close to Deneb, and divided from its brighter, larger neighbour, the North America Nebula, by a molecular cloud filled with dark dust.
Telescope
200/800 Newton
Camera
Canon EOS 1000d filter modified
Mount
HEQ-5 Synscan
Filters
Hutech LPS-V4
Guiding
Autoguider by Martin Myslivec
About the project
The whole idea of this mosaic came to me in June when me and my father went out under a starry night in the town of Jilemnice. The town itself
doesn't shine very much so I had pretty good conditions compared to other czech destinations (such as Prague). However even there the conditions vary so
that was the main problem with the mosaic - blending fields with different singal to noise ratio, different gradients and so on. I spent many days processing
all the data, experienced many computer crashes due to the lack of RAM and maybe it could be done better, but after all I am satisfied with the result!
Below you can see and download RGB and Black&White versions in resolution of 1 600px × 967px or take a look at the bigger version in the Zoomify plugin.
At the moment I don't provide full resolution images for download.
Fields of the mosaic
18
Total Exposure time
Approximately 36 hours
Exposure time of one field
Approximately 2 hours
Total number of exposures
723
Exposure time of one exposure
3 minutes
Full resolution
95 MPix
Total size of all files
197 GBytes
Postprocessing:
At first I had some problems with noisy streaks over all the images. It was probably caused by bad BIAS frame or its interpretation in Deep Sky Stacker.
All problems vanished when I started using Maxim DL (which I used before for editing images from ccd camera) for calibration and Regim for registration and stacking.
I also used a programme named MRAW (by Marek Pecka) for the calibration of one very noisy field (too high temperature that night). For final adjustments and in this case
also for alignment and blending fields I use Adobe Photoshop CS5. A sharp eye of an astrophotographer might be able to see some transits of fields (in the Zoomify) caused by different conditions during the nights.
