NGC 7000 Not-so-Preliminary Image

I finally had time to try reprocess this image using data from the August 31 outing. Much better, but I still need some practice.

The overall appearance is still a bit dark, but I need to go back to the originals and start from scratch again. If you look in the lower right-hand corner, you will notice a funny “gradient” with a sharp edge running up diagonally. That’s from stacking two sets of images with slightly different framing and noise characteristics. I need to go back to MaximDL, the image acquisition software that I also used to align and stack, and better understand the stacking parameters I use to try to eliminate that.

I did discover a better order than my last attempt. After doing a few enhancements to bring up the nebulosity brightness, start applying color saturation enhancements before going too crazy on overall additional gray-scale enhancements. This seems to have done a better job of getting star colors correct.

For more information on NGC 7000 (The North America Nebula) and its neighbor, IC 5070 (The Pelican Nebula) have a look at this Wikipedia article.