North American and Pelican Nebulas

This object has been one of the most elusive deep space objects for me to photograph.  What's so frustrating about it, is that it's a relatively easy object to photograph but my attempts can best be described as a comedy of errors.  So far, this is the best I've done, and now that this object is setting low in the west, I shall bid her a fine winter and c-ya next spring...

The north american nebula (and pelican to its lower right) are two expansive areas of nebulosity in the constellation Cygnus, the swan.  The bright star to the right of the areas of nebulosity is the bright summer star Deneb.  That star makes up one star of the asterism known as the summer triangle and is also the nothernmost star in  "the northern cross".  The above image is a composite of the two images below, the luminosity is a 45 minute exposure taken on hypered tech pan, the RGB component is a stack of two images taken last summer (click here), shot at 200mm.  The RGB was taken on LE400 up at the mancamp, the TP image was taken from the Bedford observatory.

The shot on the left was taken in August, 2002 up at the mancamp, it's a composite of two shots, 40 and 60 minutes, on Kodak LE400 and a 200mm lens.  The shot on the right was taken with hypered Tech pan and a lumicon hydrogen alpha filter.  The hypered tech pan shot was cut considerably short by sizeable errors on the st-4 guider.  I thought for sure this image was going to be a throw-away, but was pleasantly surprised by the density.  This was a 45 minute shot taken with a 200 mm soligor lens stopped down to f/4.  The f/2.8 setting which I had tried in September proved to be too much, I got blobby center stars.