HFG is an acronym for the surnames of the discoverers of the larger planetary nebula (in the upper left), who published a paper* on it in 1982: Heckathorn, Fesen and Gull, hence, HFG 1. The RGB data shows barely a whiff of anything but the narrowband reveals oddly shaped and interesting planetary nebulae: a jelly-like form (HFG 1) and a soap bubble (Abell 6) in a field of ionized hydrogen and stars.
This is an RGB image enhanced with long exposure narrowband data from OIII and Ha filters.
The Green filter data is badly out of focus on the small stars but it's mostly buried by the narrowband data.
PixelMath combination of Ha and OIII was used for luminance.
The underlying masters (except those used in the synthetic luminance), were heavily denoised using MureDenoise script, then gradient removed, then combined using ChannelCombination (for the RGB) and then NBRGBCombination (adding HOO into the RGB), creating a smooth and bright color image but lacking in detail. The luminance was created from the master OIII and Ha integrations, no denoising until after gradient removal by division, Deconvolution, stretched to non-linear, then lightly applied ACDNR on the synthetic luminance.
Basically, even with an awesome set of gear and clear dark skies, this is a tough object to image and process well. If we get more data in the future, I'd like to see how it looks with more signal.
*
Discovery of a large, high-excitation planetary nebula at L = 136 deg, B = +5 degOne amusing thought came to mind too, with this unusual HFG identifier and catalog of 1 object: how did Abell miss it?! He got Abell 6 but somehow missed HFG 1 nearby.
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