First Light: Cygnus Wall

This is the last in our series of “first light” images taken at the TURMX observatory. All of the data for these first light images was collected in the first two or three weeks of remote operation.

The object for this image is the so-called Cygnus Wall, a part of the famous North America Nebula, NGC7000. If you take the similarity of the whole nebula with the shape of the North American continent literally, then Cygnus Wall covers Mexico (bright part) and the Gulf of Mexico (dark nebula). Visually it is a dramatic sight and a place where new stars are born.

This image is a false-color composite image using Ha, OIII and SII narrowband data – almost 15 hours of exposure time in total. The individual narrowband channels are processed and combined to a so-called Hubble-pallet false-color image. In addition an artificial neural network (StarNet++) was used to eliminate all the stars from the image. This puts the dramatic combination of emission and dark nebulae into center stage.

To get an impression of how much the appearance of the nebula differs for the three emission lines – Ha, OIII, and SII – the slideshow below shows monochrome images of the individual channels, one after the other.

For the image below, the stars were added again, to create a more “complete” appearance. Remember, by clicking on the images you can open a full-resolution version in a comfortable viewer that allows a full-screen mode with zoom.