Shooting The North American Nebula and Andromeda Galaxy With the New QHY600 Monochrome Camera

Back to the Deep Sky

After spending most of the summer shooting planets and waiting for a few clear nights I finally had two clear nights in a row at new moon(!) to put the new QHY600 camera through its paces on some widefield deep-sky targets.

SkyWatcher Esprit 100mm apochromatic refractor scope on a Losmandy G11 mount in front of my condo!

I shot the North American Nebula (NGC 7000 in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan) back in 2017 during one of my first summer trips to the mountains near Asheville NC. I hadn't figured out how to really nail my polar alignment or get my mount to guide properly at that point so instead of shooting sixty 2-minute exposures as I would do now, I had to shoot 240 15-second exposures because anything longer than that elongated the stars and would result in a blurry image. Stars are not supposed to look like eggs–ever!

In spite of all that I can say that it was the first big format deep-sky object I had shot that looked like "success!" The image had its problems for sure due to the slight flail in shooting techniques but I was still encouraged.

Well, I've learned a lot in the past 3 years, have some better equipment now and so I've been waiting for the right moment to reshoot this thing all year because it's such a spectacular object, it deserves to look better.

I thought that my opportunity had slipped away for the year because of the chronically poor weather and it's a 'summer object' but two clear nights last week gave me a 'last gasp' window of opportunity so I grabbed it.

The North American Nebula (NGC 7000) and the Pelican Nebula (IC 5070–right)

The Wall

One of the great features of the North American is the “Mexico” area. It actually has its own name (unofficial) affectionately referred to as "The Wall" and there's a lot of really cool detail in this part of the image.

Everything you see here that is reddish is hydrogen gas that's being excited to glow because of the radiation from all the big, bright nearby stars.

The black areas are where dust and organic molecules that are more opaque lie between us and the background hydrogen. These are my favorite things to look at in this kind of image–so wispy and tenuous. I was really pleased with the detail that came out in this shot.

There are new stars being born in here too.

“The Wall” in Cygnus, part of the North American Nebula

Deneb: Destroyer of Astrophotos

You may have noticed that there’s something ‘not quite right’ about the area above the Pelican’s head in the main image. This is what one 2-minute exposure looks like straight out of the camera (more or less) when you're shooting.

A more or less raw image out of the camera from one of the many exposures.

I started the exposure run and I'm seeing this very strange thing going on up there but have never seen anything like this crop up on my shots before. But there's always the possibility of whack things going on when you have new equipment in the rig and I thought there might be a light leak or something.

Well I had spent the better part of 3 hours getting ready to shoot and I was finally up and running but the object was getting lower in the sky and I needed at least two-plus hours with its o I decided to just forge ahead and deal with it later in processing (hopefully) rather than chase my tail trying to find out what was causing it and coming away with nothing for the evening

It wasn't until I was almost done processing the main image that if finally dawned on me that I was being 'photobombed' by the really bright star "Deneb" which was lurking just outside the frame!

As it turned out I don't have quite have enough skill in photoshop to fix that without making a big mess so rather than chop off the top of the pelican's head I just went with it…

Here’s a diagram showing where Deneb was. I was surprised to get that much interference from it since it really wasn’t super close to the frame. But then it is a Top 20 brightness star…

M31 Redux

I guess I'm doing the astrophotography version of 'Throwback Thursday" because here's another image of something I've shot already, and fairly recently.

This is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. It's the nearest major galaxy to us which is why it's so big in the frame. I had taken what I considered to be a pretty decent photo of this just over a year ago and wasn't really planning to shoot it again but when I had my telescope rig up last Monday night, I was looking for a good target to shoot after finishing off the blue filter shots for the North American Nebula.

After taking a good look around I couldn't come up with anything better so I thought it would be interesting to see what the new camera can do and since M31 was going right overhead and I'd have at least 3 or 4 hours to shoot it before losing it into the trees I thought, 'Why not'?

Well, I'm glad I did because this could be my best astrophoto to date! I pulled out all the stops while processing the image in Photoshop to eke out every bit of detail I could. You can actually barely see this with your naked eye if you know exactly where to look and have a reasonably dark sky.

So please enjoy the Andromeda Galaxy, about 750 billion stars a mere 2.3 million light-years away.

M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, with dwarf galaxy companions M32 (top) and NGC 205 (bottom)

Dwarf Nebula

Just like pretty much every big spiral galaxy both Andromeda and the Milky Way have a number of dwarf galaxies swarming around them. Andromeda has 18 (we have 14) and the two most prominent ones are visible here as fuzzy blobs above and below the nucleus. The upper one here carries the catalog designation of M32, the lower, larger one is NGC 205/M110.

It's been widely said that we will be colliding with this thing in about 4.5 billion years since we're moving straight towards it at something like 68 miles a second.

Newly reported though is the fact that new studies of the galactic halo around show it extends nearly halfway to us! Now since we're almost as big, it's likey our halo is about the same so you could say that the collision is starting right now!. Nevertheless, in about 2.5 billion years this thing will completely fill the night sky; put that on your google calendar!

Hydrogen Alpha areas of new star formation in the outer spiral arms

I love the little pink cloudy areas concentrated in the outer spiral arms. These are areas of dense hydrogen gas referred to as "H2" areas and are indicators of ongoing new star formation.

M31 is a great sight in binoculars...

Verdict

Monochrome imaging is significantly more complicated due to having to take each shot 4 times through the various filters: luminance, red, green, and blue. This means to get a 1-hour exposure you have to invest 4 hours minimum shooting and sometimes that can be hard to come by due to weather or trees.

I gotta say though, I’m really knocked out by the detail I was able to get in The Wall in the North American and all the little dust lanes in Andromeda, even pretty close to the nucleus. I’m glad this wasn’t my first camera but now that I’ve got basic things like polar alignment, guiding, and focusing under control I’m glad to be shooting with it now.!

Bill the Sky Guy
Hilton Head Island
October 24th, 2002