NGC 7000

This is the object that got me hooked on astrophotography. Well, sort of. I started a long time ago with a Pentax 35mm film camera and a CG5 mount and tried to take a picture of Cygnus. It was horribly underexposed, but one of the frames had just enough exposure to make out the North America nebula along with the constellation outline. I was hooked.

I’ve been trying to get a better handle on processing by going through Adam Block’s tutorials and consider them well worth the money. At times he’s a bit to pedantic with his tutorials but the only worse than that would be skipping things assuming I know them; I’d rather find myself bored with him going too slow than going “wait, how did you do that?”

The image scale at 250 mm is severely undersampled which makes it a bit tricky to do both noise reduction and sharpening, and Adam’s tutorial were incredible helpful in basic things along the lines of “play with the parameters and see what works.”. Even with the undersampled star images, there are things you can do to for noise reduction and deconvolution even if they don’t really show at this image scale (downsampled 5:1).

On the other hand, one thing I always struggled with was shadow detail and ending up with the “picket-fence” in my histogram after stretching. I don’t remember exactly which tutorial it’s in, but Adam covers that at one point, almost in passing, but still being very clear. The key was the dynamic range extension when I’ve got shadow detail I want so separate from the noise. The 150 minutes of exposure for this fairly bright object still has enough noise that that was necessary and that made a huge difference in the smooth brightness transitions in the nebula.