Amazing Sky by Alan Dyer

This is a framing of an array of emission nebulas in Cygnus: the bright North America Nebula (NGC 7000) at right, and to the right of it, the Pelican Nebula (IC 5067/8). Those bright nebulas are set amid a complex of fainter nebulosity, notably the Clamshell Nebula at left, as it has become known recently, and catalogued as Sharpless 2-119. At bottom right is the curving Cygnus Arc, aka IC 5068. The small star cluster NGC 7044 is below the Clamshell.

In processing, I tried to bring out the faint nebulosity while still maintaining the brightest nebulas as bright, and not compressing the dynamic range too much. But in reality, all the nebulosity here, other than the North America and Pelican Nebulas, is faint.

This is a stack of filtered images taken with the Sharpstar 61EDPHIII apo refractor with its Reducer/Flattener at f/4.4 and with the astro-modified (by AstroGear.net) Canon EOS R camera, and taken in full colour but rendered here in monochrome. The conversion to monochrome was in Adobe Camera Raw.

The set is a stack of 12 images through an IDAS NBZ dual narrowband filter, for 8 minutes each at ISO 3200. Though the filter passed green Oxygen III wavelengths, the primary light recorded here was red Hydrogen-alpha. All were autoguided and inter-frame dithered with the Lacerta MGENIII stand-alone autoguider. No darks or LENR employed on these fairly warm August nights. All stacked, aligned and blended in Photoshop CC.

Luminosity masks created with Lumenzia brought out the faint nebulosity. An application of the Detail Extractor filter in the Nik Collection Color EFX module enhanced the nebula structures. Noise reduction was with NoiseXTerminator.