Raw frames courtesy of Deep Sky West Remote Observatory in New Mexico, USA. (deepskywest.com) Data obtained with FSQ 106EDXiii / QSI683wsg / Lodestar / Paramount MyT.

17 hrs total integration (14x900s R, 14x900s G, 15x900s B, and 26x900s L). The palette is LRGB.

Processing in PixInsight.

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Well... (boy this one is a tough object to process well)

Revision attempts to mitigate the "in your face" field stars, and also goes a bit deeper into the cloudy structure. Not really sure yet if I like this better or not. The previous one just had such bright field stars that it detracted from the central subject. Jury is still out on this one...

Wow! it's a constant struggle to maintain image sharpness, while also moderating the tiny and numerous faint field stars. Everything is compromise...

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Revision H: Eh!? Have to stop worrying about preserving edge sharpness. There aren't any edges in the central subject of this image. So go ahead and remove the smallest scale wavelet contributions.

Also, the quantum leap from the prior version happens because I delayed noise removal until after the luminance channel was combined with the RGB image, and after major stretching in RGB and Saturation. Need to remember this... removing noise too early only damages what can be achieved later.

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Okay, that was clunky... Let's back up and take a different approach. In this image, the stars really are a large part of the story. But let's try to keep them from bloating out of control on the way to enhancing the whispy clouds.

And those clouds are really probably making everything a bit yellowish, not white. This is like smoke particles scattering light. It really should become redder after scattering out the blue light for light sources behind the cloud.

The processing job was made much easier here by targeting background levels around 0.5 with MaskedStretch. Then after the initial stretch and Luminance blending, we can carve downward, instead of upward during subsequent stretches. The final stretch is then applied with a sigmoid curve centered over the cloud's histogram, making sure to keep those bright stars in check.