My backyard is wonderful and I love to see the trees growing and offering food and shelter for the birds, but my imaging windows are getting smaller and smaller!

Couple that with the clouds we have had this (non) winter and it seems to take forever to collect enough data to create a decent image. I say non-winter because while we have had clouds, we have had worryingly mild temperatures and very little precipitation and most of that has been rain. I haven't even touched my skis for either alpine or Nordic this season. 

Nevertheless, a recent spell of clear skies did allow me to get the covers off the rig. Here is what I managed to do with the useable data. I have imaged the Medusa before, but with a dual-band filter/OSC camera. This one is with the mono QHY268M and Astronomik Ha and Oiii filters. 

I tried processing one version of the combined  stars and nebula and while I got a nice result on the nebula, I couldn't control the stars as much as I would like. My starless processing of each master blended back with separately treated stars seemed better, so here it is. I hope I haven't pushed what I have too hard, but I suspect I might have, trying to bring out the fainter parts extending to the northwest. It looks like  the ripples you see in shallow water on a sandy bottom, especially in the triangular wisp of Ha emission just to the west of the brighter main structure . I presume this is from the formation process of the nebula over time. 

Comments and/or critique are welcome. I realized after posting (and an effort to see if I could create a difference in the fainter areas of nebulosity by using GraXpert as a gradient reducer than PI's new GradientCorrection--answer: with my skill level and perception, no) that I have overcooked the saturation a bit here.  Oops. There are some really marvellous images of the Medusa here on AstroBin, all with much longer total imaging time than I can hope for this season. A deeper image will have to wait!