The goal with this image was to keep the color scheme natural to the extent that this was possible given the low amount of RGB data and difficulty of doing broadband low on the horizon under heavy light pollution. As you might guess, Ha and a little SII was used in the red channel and OIII was used in the blue and green channels. However, weight was given to the RGB image when doing color, but a SHO stack comprising all SHO data was used as a luminance layer.
I think this is a deceptively tricky target. You think it's going to be easy since it's one of the brightest targets in the sky, but balancing it well - extracting the fainter parts while not overexposing the brighter parts - is not an easy job. Given how little free time I have lately, I didn't spend as much time processing it as I could have or should have.
I think that now that I've published this, I can take down the oldest DSO that was still on my wall:
my previous version of M17 done in July of 2016. Everyone has to start somewhere, right?
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