Cygnus Wall - NGC 7000 (SHO)

[Richard_]

The Cygnus Wall is a small section of NGC 7000 North America Nebula. This was the first target I imaged with the QHY268M I bought ~6 months ago and was captured over 6 evenings in Summer 2022. I accidentally used a wrong size spacer and didn't quite get the right back focus which resulted in my stars being slightly elongated in the corners, so I put these subs to one side until now. Along came Russell Crowman's excellent BlurXTerminator which is not only an amazing deconvolution tool, but makes a big improvement in star shape and made this data set useable!

• Straight up Hubble palette (SHO -> RGB), no special blends here
• Cropped from 6252 x 4176  -->  3322 x 2376 for better framing
• A total of 11hrs integration time with Antlia 4.5nm SHO filters (3:3:5)
• Imaging dates:
  • 15-Jul-22
  • 27-Jul-22
  • 07-Aug-22
  • 10-Aug-22
  • 11-Aug-22
  • 19-Sep-22

See my Astrobin page for more details on equipment and image acquisition: https://www.astrobin.com/kmol9p/

Comments and feedback are of course, welcome 🙂

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Fantastic use of BlurXT there 🙂 

Steve

[Richard_]

5 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Fantastic use of BlurXT there 🙂 

Steve

Thanks Steve!

For those interested, the image below shows the "as captured" Field of View and shows the image with an unlinked stretch directly after combining the SHO channels (before BlurXTerminator). The corner/edge stars are heavily distorted and not even BXT could salvage them. The stars in the cropped area per the OP are blobby but round, and through careful use of BXT you can sharpen the stars and reduce the size of the halo without introducing any ringing artifacts.

I used to spend ages with the EZ Decon tool and still wouldn't end up with good results. 5-10 minutes fine tuning the BXT tool parameters yielded amazing results, really happy with the outcome.