NGC 7000 and the Cygnus Wall
NGC-7000 is an immense area of dust and hot hydrogen gas viewed in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. It has the colloquial name “the North America Nebula”, because the outline resembles the Gulf of Mexico.
The telltale pink colour reveals it as a region of star formation, with a very intense area called the “Cygnus Wall”, seen here at the right. The contrasting dark regions are part of the “Cygnus Fissure”, a band of interstellar dust in our arm of the galaxy.
The distance to NGC-7000 is 2,600 light-years and spans 140 light-years. The Cygnus Wall is only 20 light-years long, but this is 3600 times longer than the diameter of our solar system.
I photographed NGC-7000 from my garden in Strasbourg France. I captured 100 images (3 minutes each) in August 2025 and combined it with 80 images from September 2023 (9 hours of photography).