You're looking at an image stack of the North America Nebula (aka NGC 7000). This Saturday I was aiming to captures the Pleiades, however, since it wasn't visible from my backyard before 3:30 am, I targeted NGC 7000 beforehand. Since I'm not using a narrowband filter for enhancing Oxygen 3 or Hydrogen levels and my Canon 70D is not astro modified, this target's nebulae are much more dim than I'd like.

Alignment wasn't perfect and had to ditch about half of the lights. This was a bit of a pain. Still wanted to share since the session contained an important lesson for me; prepare for only one target each session and give it all :)

🔭 Clear skies everyone!

Shots:

43 lights of 75 sec each at ISO 160032 darks(Used previous session master bias, and master flat files)

Post processing / Software:

• PixInsight; stacking, calibration, noise reduction
• Starnet++ (MacOS CLI); generating a layer without stars for Photoshop use
• Photoshop; minor color enhancements and contrast adjustments

Equipment used:

• Skywatcher's Star Adventurer for polar alignment
• Canon 70D (unmodified, sensor: APS-C)
• TW-283-PIXEL; remote shutter controller
• William Optics' Red Cat 51 II (combined with crop sensor 250mm goes to 400mm)
• Dew band