The Cygnus Wall is the brightest portion of the much larger North America nebula (NGC 7000), located near Deneb in the constellation Cygnus. Nearly 20 light years long, the Cygnus Wall is the region in NGC 7000 where the most concentrated star formation is going on, and forms the Mexico-like region of the North America nebula.
H II regions like this glow red thanks to hydrogen gas being ionized by a star, and in the case of the Cygnus Wall, that star wasn’t known for a while. Only in 2004, by astronomers Fernando Comerón and Anna Pasquali, was that star finally discovered, and given the very creative name J205551.3+435225. The star, simply named for where it is in the sky, is located right in the middle of some dark molecular clouds off the coast of Florida relative to NGC 7000, and has been nicknamed the Bajamar Star, a reference to the Bahamas islands. the Bajamar Star undergoes a very high level of extinction (dimming) thanks to all the dust and gas that’s in front of it, resulting in it only being magnitude 13, and thus just barely visible. The star is so luminous, however, that it would glow at magnitude 3 if it wasnt dimmed so badly, making it as bright as Albireo, the star that forms Cygnus’s head.
My photo was taken with 3nm hydrogen-alpha and oxygen-III filters, to better highlight the specifc regions of hydrogen and oxygen ionization going on here. Combined in the common HOO pallete, the red colors here are from hydrogen ionization, and the blue is due to oxygen ionization, although said oxygen sadly didn’t show up too well in this short integration time of less than one hour. Hopefully next summer, and hopefully when the skies aren’t as cloudy as they’ve been this season, I’ll get much better details of this beautiful nebula.
JML Astrophotos 