NORTH AMERICA NEBULA | NGC2237

I started my Astrophotography journey on June 16th 2022, at the time the North America Nebula was perfectly positioned for my first test, It was pure luck I chose a bright target, I had no idea, I started the night shooting it then moved on to shoot the Andromeda Galaxy a few hours later, I didn't have any equipment at all, just my DSLR camera with a 80mm lens that was not manual, so the focus ring didn't have a stop making it more difficult to properly focus, I never heard of a bahtinov mask at the time too, and the cheapest Manfrotto tripod. I had to take 50 shots probably less than 5 seconds each, and re align the target, rise repeat at the time I did not have any mount so I used my iphone to find the targets. So much happened until the North America Nebula came back in the sky, so a proper tribute to revisit this beautiful target. Here is a progression on this target, I used this nebula as my learning object, and I did re-shoot it often as my learning progressed so it is nice to see the evolution. Finally it is back so that I can continue shooting it to see how much I've learned. Unfortunately this is just 2h 6m of total integration, so there is just little data to work with, but I'm impressed how far I could push this capture... Will definitely capture a widefield view of the whole area again in the coming months

It's really nice to use the whole short summer night in a single target, so I got a good 5h 20m of data, subs of 5 minutes each.

HOO and natural color

Sharpstar 61 EDPH II + 0.7 reducer @f4.5
ASI183MC PRO dedicated astrocamera
iOptron GEM 28 mount
SVBONY 7nm Duo Band filter
SVBONY 30mm f4 Guide Scope
ASI120MM mini guide camera with red filter
ASIAir mini
Bortle 8-9

Software: DeepSkyStacker > Siril > Astrosharp > Photoshop > Topaz Denoiser

The images above shows my progression over the years on this target, NGC7000 was the very first DSO I pointed a camera at, I had no clue what I was soing but was able to capture that first ever light of my life, I consider Andromeda my fisrt target because I shot it in the same night and processed it first so it was my first complete process from capturing to revealing the DSO, but the North America was technically shot 2 hours before Andromeda.

I’ll continue to capture this nebula for the next years to come and compare my progress with my younger self.