Shooting Stars

The North American Nebula (NGC7000):

In June 2016 I set out on a mission to image NGC7000, The North American Nebula, from my front yard in St. Ann's. It's dim, in our light polluted skies, so I was sure this would take a few nights to gather enough exposure time. I ended up shooting on six different moon-free nights through-out the summer and gathered over 14 hours of exposure! After my last shooting session on Sep 6th I went through all the frames manually and deleted 4.5 hours of imperfect frames. I then allowed Deep Sky Stacker to eliminate another 10% automatically. This made a nice hi-res, low-noise, 8.5 hour image to process.
Lesson learned: The last few nights of shooting, I had to flip the view as my target crossed the Meridian! What I didn't think about, was that the diffraction spikes on the larger stars would not match with the spikes from all my previous shots. Fortunately, the spikes ended up 45 degree offset from the original view, so it looks like I did it on purpose!
The image is 102 x 5 minute frames (8.5 total hours) @ 1600iso shot in June, July, August and September (20 flats, 20 darks and 20 offsets) with a 8 inch F5 Skywatcher Newtonian and a Canon T3i (modified) with coma corrector and LP filter.

This has been my favourite image to process thus far! The detail and natural colour amaze me. It's incredible, what appears to be a black sky, is actually so full of colour and artistry.

"God's creation" is specifically referred to in 314 verses thru-out scripture! I believe it is wise to give Him full credit for all of creation, and then allow science to fit into the cracks!