I love astrophotography in the fall.  There are so many great targets to image in narrowband, and many of them are in the northern celestial hemisphere.  From the deck in my backyard the southern and western skies are fairly obstructed.  Southern targets I can squeeze a max of 3-4 hrs per night, making these kind of mega-projects difficult to complete.  It feels like a waste of a good night when there are 8-10+ hrs available.. to only shoot a few hours.  However, when I turn toward the northern sky I have no obstructions.  As the nights grow longer I can capture 8+ hrs per night which allows me to do some pretty deep imaging on those targets.

The Heart Nebula is a crowd favorite for sure with its iconic shape and beautifully rich details.  Melotte 15 glistens in the center.  This year I have been aiming for 30/30/30 in terms of hours captured in SHO.  I always allocate 1 hr to capture RGB stars.  When you shoot this much you get an excellent SNR in the stacked images, which makes editing so much easier.  Instead of spending much of the editing process trying to bring out color while hiding noise, I can just combine the images in straight SHO and go from there.  No need to work with a color image, convolute to mask noise, and apply the better SNR Ha as lum.  Not that this technique isn't tried and true.. I think it produces excellent results.  However, there are details in oxygen and sulfur that the luminance data from Ha just won't bring out correctly.  So you end up with splotchy colors here and there.  I have an extreme fondness for Sii in particular.  If you are having to budget your imaging time due to weather, obstructions, or just life in general.. I would highly recommend allocating more time to that filter in particular.

Anyways, I hope you like this image and please feel free to message me if you have any questions!  The best way to reach me would be on Instagram @bright_ascension .