Getting my Astrotrac driven mount has given me a renewed interest in astrophotography. Here's my latest stack, centred on the North America Nebula region of Cygnus, as it's currently overhead from my latitude in the first part of the night. This means it's the darkest part of my light-polluted sky, so less work to process it out.
This is a stack of 12 30-second exposures with the 70-200/4L at 70mm f/4 on my unmodified 7D at ISO1600. I also used 10 flats, 10 darks, a similar number of dark flats and about 28 bias exposures, all to try and get the best final result I could manage. I stacked using the Kappa-Sigma Clipping method, which seemed to give me a better result than the default averaging. I neutralised the sky colour and boosted saturation of the stars a little, all in Deep Sky Stacker, and then did a little contrast stretching using curves in Photoshop. Nothing more than that. On the full-size version the faintest stars are about magnitude 14.5.
You can clearly see NGC7000, the North America Nebula, though I can see why people get the 60Da, or modify their existing bodies, because the red colour is very muted here. I've also faintly captured the Pelican, IC5070, and some of the brightest bits of IC1317, near Gamma Cyg (on the far right of the image), plus a handful of open clusters. I've pointed these out in a labelled version below the original.
