Capturing his winning image from a backyard observatory, Ed Mizzi is the Photo of the Week winner for February 25, 2022, with a closeup of the Cygnus Wall.

The Cygnus Wall is a part of NGC 7000, which is commonly known as the North America Nebula due to its resemblance to the continent it is named after. Located approximately 1,500 light-years away from Earth, the North American Nebula is a large emission nebula, located within the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

Ed Mizzi captured the image of the nebula in his backyard observatory in Waterdown, Ontario. He acquired the data for this image between August 23 and September 2, 2021 over seven different evenings, and sent SkyNews a picture of his observatory along with his submission.

Mizzi used a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 mm APO (f/5.5) with a ZWO ASI183 Mono to collect an impressive 17.6 hours of data: 6.9 hours of Hydrogen-alpha data, 5.4 hours of Oxygen III and 5.3 hours of Sulphur II data to put this image together. He edited the image in PixInsight and Photoshop CS6.

The portion of the nebula he captured spans about 20 light-years, “or 190,000,000,000,000 kilometres,” he wrote.

Honourable mention

This week’s honourable mention goes to Ron Brecher, who captured an image of NGC 1579.

It is known as the Trifid of the North due to its resemblance to the Trifid Nebula (Messier 20) located in the southern sky.

The Trifid of the North is a dusty star-forming region that provides contrasting emission and reflection nebulae in the same field. The central region of the object glows the red from hydrogen gas excited by the hot stars whereas the blue regions are reflected starlight.

Brecher brings us this image of the Trifid of the North from his SkyShed in Guelph, Ontario. He spent 17 days gathering data for this image between January 15 to 31, 2022.