The Great Wall of North America (NGC 7000)

The North America Nebula earned that name due to its shape strikingly resembling the North American continent. Pictured here is the “southern” part of the nebula, which, apart from showing what looks like the Gulf of Mexico, features a star-forming region that looks like long wall (facing the ‘Pacific’), informally dubbed the Great Wall of North America.

NGC 7000 occupies a relatively large area in the sky, located in constellation Cygnus — The Great Wall is also sometimes called the Cygnus Wall. It is interesting however that the distance (and therefore also the size) of this huge complex of interstellar gas and dust is not known exactly.

It is unknown which star illuminates (ionizes) the hydrogen cloud that we can then see. One hypothesis is that it is the star Deneb, twentieth brightest star when observed from Earth (not shown on this photograph).  If so, the distance from us to the cloud complex would be some 1,500 to 1,600 light years away from us.

NGC 7000

Data and processing: Goran Petrov
License: Creative Commons BY NC (free for non-commercial use, with attribution).
Click on the image to view in full size.


Location: s. German, Rankovce, Macedonia
Date: 2016-08-26
Total integration time: 6 hours


Camera: ATIK One 9.0, cooled to -20C
Telescope: Takahashi FSQ 106 ED refractor
Filters:
Ha, SII, OIII: total of 36 x 10 min


Processed in PixInsight.

This photograph was made with the use of narrowband filters.
Narrowband Information was mapped to RGB (with a modified Hubble Palette).
Luminance information was synthetized from narrowband.