Moana Project Data is so kindly provided by @blackrig  open for anyone to process! A big shoutout for this truly awesome dataset--and after 3 weeks and counting of clouds, rain and snow, this data was a life saver!

For those that want to try it, this data and more is here: https://erellaz.com/moana/open-datasets

The dataset is a two-panel mosaic.

The equipment is:

• DIY 250 mm/1325mm/f5.3 Newtonian Astrograph
• ASI1600MM Camera
• AP1100 GTO Mount
• Location: DSO Fort Davis, Texas

The Lagoon Nebula needs little introduction, but here area a few quick notes of interest.

At  4100 light years distance the Lagoon spans 50 x 110 light years. Part of a larger molecular cloud, the Lagoon is an extended emission nebula and an H II region, ionized into visibility mainly by the two bright O-type stars, 9 Sagitarii  and HD 165052.

The young open cluster NGC 6530 is embedded within the nebula and is a continuing birthplace of stars.

The nebula is also splattered with dark Bok globules, which are collapsing clouds of proto-stellar material, also stellar nurseries.

The Lagoon is also  home to the small 15x30” Hourglass Nebula, a bipolar nebula excited by the bright O-star Herschel 36. The Hourglass is believed to be an ionized cavity in an inhomogeneous and clumpy molecular cloud.

The Hourglass region also contains the ultracompact H II region G5.97-1.17, as well as infrared sources. X-ray emission has been detected as well from Herschel 36 and the Hourglass. More information can be found here:  https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0506552.pdf.

An excellent general description of this area can be found in this Sky and Telescope article: https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/wallow-a-while-in-the-lagoon-nebula/. The map below of the region comes from that article, but oriented to match my image. Note Dab 1 and 2 are other dark globules which were nicknamed in the article (origin of the nickname is not clear). You should be able to identify all these features in my image.

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My Processing
For the RGB stars I used the 262x 2 m = 524 m LRGB set.

For the SHO image I used the SII 59x5m = 295 m, OIII 69x 5 m =345 m, Ha 72x5m = 360 m. There was also a further set of 76 x 5 m = 380 m of RGB data.  All the data, including the 2 m exposures for LRGB stars, showed strong nebulosity signals, so I decided to do an odd thing and use all the exposures in the luminance for the SHO image, hence LSHO with 32 hours of data in total. 

I calibrated, registered, and stacked all images using DeepSkyStacker.

Most of my processing was done in Startools. I processed each panel separately and identically: which including a slight crop, a wipe for background extraction, a development stretch, deconvolution, then I processed color as SHO: 40SII+60Ha,70Ha+30OIII,100OIII, also turning down the volume on the green channel. I did a second set of processing with the LRGB stars.

In Photoshop, I merged the two nebulosity panels and the two RGB star panels using the automated align, which worked great. The two sets were aligned manually to get the RGB stars in the correct locations--which was fiddly. Then I separated the nebulosity from the stars in both sets using StarXterminator. For both sets I made separate color and levels adjustment tweaks. I used APF-R multiscale unsharp mask (used by NASA) on the nebulosity to reduce blurriness. Then I used NoiseXterminator for noise reduction separately on the nebula and star layers. I add the star layer back into the nebula layer with screen mode.