North America Nebula

[JimFox]

I captured this last month out in Joshua Tree National Park, it's the North America Nebula or NGC 7000. Since my mom broke her hip I have not really been able to do any kind of processing other then super fast editing. With editing Astro, they are much more time consuming, so this one was much harder to get done, and I was only able to edit for 30 to 45 mins a night the last few nights on this. Not optimal conditions, but I think this turned out pretty good for my first North America Nebula project.


Nikon D850
Tamron 150-600mm at 300mm f6
SkyGuider Pro tracker
56 x 2 min exp at ISO 1600
12 - Dark Frames

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[Colorado CJ]

Looks great Jim, you are progressing very fast!

That Nikon looks like it really captures H-Alpha well. Many dslrs can't capture that since their "hot mirror" is too strong.

Hope your mom gets well.

 

[AlanLichty]

Amazing what you can tease out of this with the right edits.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Beautiful image Jim

 

[Jameel Hyder]

You are doing great Jim with the astro work. I am enjoying the various posts here with deep space images.

 

[JimFox]

Looks great Jim, you are progressing very fast!

That Nikon looks like it really captures H-Alpha well. Many dslrs can't capture that since their "hot mirror" is too strong.

Hope your mom gets well.

Thanks so much Andrew! I am really liking how the D850 is capturing these Deep Space Objects. I know using a DSLR will limit what I can capture well, but so far I am having a blast finding which objects I can capture and display decently.

 

[JimFox]

Amazing what you can tease out of this with the right edits.

Thanks Alan, it's been fun to see.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Jim,

That's a great result! As Andrew said, you are getting a surprising amount of Ha through the blocking filter on your DSLR. Your level of detail and colors look very good. This is a fun image too because it illustrates the differing brightness levels of objects, even ones that are co-located in the sky. When you see individual images of the North America Nebula and the Pelican Nebula, it is easy to lose track of the difference in brightness between the 2. Here it is plain to see that while both would be considered to be bright deep sky objects the North America Nebula is noticeably brighter.

One minor nit to pick with the processing is to my eye. Although It is a bit hard to really evaluate at this image scale, I think you might have gone just a little too far on the star reduction. While this area DOES benefit from reducing the stars, in this case it seems to me that you have started to reduce them too far, which loses their star-like quality and might also start to muddy up some of your other fine detail.

A minor issue for sure though on an excellent image!

 

[Alisa]

I see you are really liking this type of photo!