This is a beautiful region of the Large Magellanic Cloud often called the cosmic reef.  But, in the spirit of the season, the features look to me like ornaments decorating a cosmic wonderland.  This area located on the outer fringe of the Tarantula nebula complex.

The LMC is actually a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way, located only 163,000 light years away from us.  Its is estimated to be 1/100th of the mass of the Milky Way.  It is an extremely luminous object.  It is so bright, that if it were as close to the Earth as the Orion Nebula it would cast visible shadows.  The entire region is easily visible with the naked eye from dark sky sites.

There are so many jewels hidden within the LMC.  You can find a few in my gallery including a wide field view of the Tarantula complex.  This is an area where I look forward to continued exploration with the long focal length RiDK.

Observing conditions were good, but not great.  I struggled to achieve decent HFRs and the initial process attempt was a bit of a mess.  The final result definitely could be better in my opinion.  However, I think I successfully overcame some of the issues with aggressive star reduction and careful stretching with GHS which gave the image depth.  BlurXterminator and some other gentle sharpening later in the workflow were key steps as well in this one.

A kind of a pattern has developed for me now.  With almost every image that I process, I always seem to get to a point about one third through the workflow where I resign to the fact that the data for this target is simply not good enough to create a compelling image.  But I seem to push through every time and end up with a decent result.  I tend to walk away from it for a few days, then study similar award winning images on AB while taking notes.  Then I attack it again with those note in mind.  Seems to work!

Happy Holidays and CS