This portion of NGC 7000, the North American Nebula, is known as the Cygnus Wall. When taking the whole of the nebula into account, the Cygnus Wall represents the Mexico and Central American components of the continent. Photographically it is clearly the most interesting region of the North American Nebula; a place where the crushing forces of gravity is creating new stars amid the highly contrasted regions of light and dark. Adjacent to the bright Wall can be seen the deep black Gulf of Mexico, its dark lanes and filamentary wisps composed of cold gas and dust; the ingredients of future stars. The Wall is actually an ionization front where UV light from hot, young stars is transforming the cold gas of interstellar space into the ghostly glow of ionized hydrogen that is so readily picked up with modern CCD cameras imaging through a narrowband H-alpha filter.

At a distance of about 1500 light years from Earth, the above view spans a distance of about 30 light years or approximately 180 trillion miles from left to right. That’s about 50,000 times the distance from the Sun to our recently demoted 9 th planet, Pluto!