The North American Nebula, also known as NGC 7000, is a large emission nebula in the constellation of Cygnus. The name is obvious because the shape of this nebula looks a lot like the continent it was named after.
Because of its distance, the light that was captured by my telescope and camera left the nebula about 2500 years ago. Hence the distance is quoted as being 2500 light years.
The North American Nebula (NGC7000) ( Sep 20, 2020)
The dark area near the center is the Gulf of Mexico. Florida sticks down on the right and Mexico extends from the left center towards the bottom. One particularly bright yellow star marks Miami; another marks New Orleans. You can let your imagination roam further – I see Raleigh, Greensboro and Winston-Salem as blue stars near the right.
The North American Nebula is enormous - it covers an more than four times the size of the full moon. Because of this, my camera is not able to fit it all into a single image. Instead, I took three separate 15 minute exposures and then stitched them together using special software to produce this single mosaic image. Even at that, I would have needed several more exposures to capture the Canada portion of the nebula.