Monday 12 June 2023

Cygnus Wall

The light June nights can be a very difficult time to image deep sky objects, if the moon doesn't interfere then the lack of darkness here at 52 degrees is just as bad. A few years ago I imaged the NGC7000 region in a mosaic capturing both the North America Nebula and the Pelican as well. This time would be a little different with more focal length I knew the Cygnus wall would frame up quite nicely. Over a period of 4 nights I have managed to capture around nine hours of data using the ha and Oiii filters in the hope to produce a HOO image.

I will be capturing data using my Optolong narrowband filters inside the Zwo 36mm filter wheel.

The Cygnus wall is a small part of the overall North America Nebula, The nebula is an emission type intermixed with a wall of dust, the final region covers a huge 70 light years.

My rig like most are under sampled using 3.76 micron pixels on the 130mm refractor so when processing I use a 2 drizzle integration. The downside to this was leaving it overnight to process the data in WBPP

Single 180 second Ha frame


113 x 180 seconds combined master. ABE, Blur X, & Noise X applied

Single 180 second Oiii


83 x 180 seconds combined master. ABE, Blur X, & Noise X applied


I used a pixel Maths expression to combine the 2 frames


Lets go Starless



 Red & Blue masks created to tease out some additional colour, plenty of contrast added added some Convolution to blur the colour data. I duplicated the Ha master giving some high contrast and some serious deconvolution adding sharpness and added to the near completed image. Finally I added the star back in.


I am very pleased with the final result. What do you guys think?



California Nebula

  NGC1499 The California Nebula. Discovered in 1889 The California Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation of Perseus, currently v...