Pelican and North American Nebula Mosaic

The last three months have been spent learning how to use PixInsight, a powerful new image processing platform.  One of its features is the capacity to stitch together individual images into a mosaic.  Normally, a given image only accesses a relatively narrow cross section of the night sky, the dimensions of which are determined by the size of the camera's ccd chip and the optical characteristics of the telescope to which the camera is attached.  (The equipment in the Robservatory captures a slice of sky roughly the size of the full moon.)  The mosaic capability removes this constraint.  The image presented here is a two frame mosaic.  Each frame consists of about nine hours of exposure, three hours each shot through Ha, OIII,and SII filters.  These two composite frames were stitched together so well by the program, that the "seam" between them, which runs vertically down the image's midline, is virtually invisible. While the mosaic feature is not unique to PixInsight, it is one of many features of this new and exciting program that has given imagers more sophisticated processing tools specially designed for astrophotography.

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Image information:
This emission nebula on the left is famous partly because it resembles Earth's continent of North America. To the right of the North America Nebula, cataloged as NGC 7000, is a less luminous nebula that resembles a pelican, and is thus dubbed the Pelican Nebula. The two emission nebula measure about 50 light-years across, are located about 1,500 light-years away, and are separated by a dark absorption cloud. This  image captures the nebulas, bright ionization fronts, and fine details of the dark dust. The nebulae can be seen with binoculars from a dark location. Look for a small nebular patch north-east of bright star Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus. It is still unknown which star or stars ionize the red-glowing hydrogen gas. (Source: NASA APOD).