When you fail at a nebula image, at least you have abstract art.

I remember setting up in between clouds earlier this year for the Flaming Star (IC 405 / SH 2-229) nebula from my Bortle 9 backyard. After the Horsehead I'd slew over to the Flaming Star since it was still up and utilized the camera positioning well. I started off hopeful, thinking that my little APS-C one shot camera could grab enough integration time with just a dual-band filter in front of it but no reducer (first two problems). Eventually over a few days, spread through about a month of time, I'd gathered over 150 shots of 120, 180 and 300 seconds. So I remained feeling pretty hopeful that after Deep Sky Stacker put all of the groups together, at least 3 hours of the decent 70% left would be enough integration time to start seeing some of this region. 

But alas, with each round of curves I stretched in Photoshop, I could see the red deep in the picture, yet to reach it I'd have to accept more and more pixelation. When you're doing this in Photoshop, you can really feel the lift in a way, as you manually do 12-13 curve stretches then merge down the curves, leveling afterward, until the DSO begins to appear - but not too fast or you clip too much. Eventually I'd keep cropping in tighter as I saw the drift from different nights of layering show up. Finally, I realized I acquired new dust since my last flat, so with the arrival of two large dust blotches in the worst spots combined with more pixelation, I threw in the towel, cropped to avoid - it was a lost cause.

So what do you do when you stretch the image too soon? Why not have a little fun, practice PixInsight workflow as an alternative to try to do better (current final revision), or bump up the denoise and chrominance up to 100% for some abstract art :-) I'll meet you again, Flaming Star nebula, once I have more data in dark skies... in the meantime, enjoy the better art renditions of this nebula.

If you're left brained, look away now! Otherwise which fail version do you like best?