Summer 2023 has been busy here but not a lot of clear night sky time, and then we took off for about 6 weeks altogether travelling in our new little trailer now known as Helix. (The logo from the manufacturer is a smiling little snail and the taxonomic name for land snails is Helix...)I initially thought I could be ambitious and take advantage of the profusion of targets in the constellation of Cygnus, the celestial swan, and do a nice 2x2 mosaic capturing a couple of neat ones set in the general glow of the Milky Way, but time and weather have slowed progress. I have managed to get an adequate amount of H-alpha for the full 2x2, but decided to concentrate my Oiii acquisition on one panel, given prevailing conditions. I keyed on the panel with WR134, as I really wanted to see if I could bring out the radial structure in Oiii seen in some other images by others with similar equipment (like Alex Ranous). Wolf Rayet stars are rare but  offer great opportunity o see a star almost at the tipping point of going supernova. For a pretty dense read, look up Wolf Rayet stars on wikipedia…I don’t know about you, but I find doing gradient removal on narrowband images pretty much not very useful, as there doesn’t appear to be much there in my images. Maybe I just don’t use the tools properly? I am eager to try the new GraXpert AI version, which I just learned about (thanks, Cuiv!) to see if it makes a difference. And I struggled to bring out the same detail in the radial structure of the Oiii signal seen in images with about the same total integration in that band until I went the starless-first workflow path. StarXterminator on the linear, BXT’d and NXT’d image allowed me to stretch the nebulous parts much more productively and I then recombined with the Oiii stars with les stretch, giving a nice star reduction effect.  I try to process narrowband masters as fully as possible prior to combining into HOO or SHO versions to maximize detail and contrast available in each and targeting a normalized background of around 0.1 plus or minus a bit. I find that this gives a fairly well balanced overall histogram, as well as a pleasing image (to me).  This image uses 35 five minute images for the hydrogen component (just shy of 3 hours) and 86 five minute images for the oxygen signal or just over 7 hours. Of course, I had to throw out a fair number of sub-frames for various reasons—Subframe Selector is an impartial friend!. I tried a wide range of histogram adjustments and blending strategies but settled on this version, at least for now. I will see if anyone comes up with any suggestions or comments that might help.  I do have the hydrogen part of the larger mosaic done , but the rest of the oxygen part may have to wait til next year--we'll see but the weather isn't looking too promising for the next while and Cygnus is heading west sooner and sooner every night. Most swans migrate north-south but astronomical swans move east to west!