LBN 552 is a beautiful molecular cloud in Cepheus with far more going on than you might think at first glance.  This particular image focuses on the region of the cloud containing LDN 1228, the large dusty structure in the foreground.  Within this, there are a number of Herbig-Haro objects showing off their characteristic orange glow.  Toward the bottom of the image, you'll see some reflection elements with a warmer color cast than the rest of the image, giving it a nice contrast to the large, bright blue stars dotting the field.  The weather in New Mexico has been fairly dismal this past month, largely due to wind up on the mesa that just won't stop, so my imaging out there has slowed to a crawl--even when the roof is open the wind has caught my 12" Newtonian like a sail and the guiding graph looks like there's an earthquake going on.  So to get my imaging fix, I again used data from Insight Observatory's 16" Dream rig down at SkyPi, under the very thinly veiled excuse for doing diligence on my next potential scope purchase.  

Processing this was all about showing off that beautiful dust, and that required some serious stretching, since it's very faint.  The downside to such aggressive stretching is noise, and lots of it.  I really hate using noise reduction, and would prefer noise over over-cooked, plastic-y pixels, so I left a lot of it in but I did use a light application of both chrominance and lightness de-noising to cut down on the very worst of it. I also did some masking and stretching to bring out a little more contrast, particularly at the local level, which I think helped some.  And that's about it.  Again, this is another one where my pushing of the data was all about just making faint things brighter, rather than enhancing crazy colors or textures, so I tried to keep the rest as natural as possible to let the object speak for itself.  I would really like to come back to this and get about 3 - 4x more integration time to bring out the faint structures while reducing the noise, but that will be a project for another day.