Greetings everyone!

I hope everyone has been having a great week. I know I have with all of these clear skies.. whoduh thought... In fact.. I was able to image for 8 nights in a row which is rathe rare for the Cincinnati / tri-state area!

There were good nights and there were bad nights. I spent the first 4 nights collecting Narrowband data on the Pac-Man Nebula. This all went smoothly and I was able to gather about 30hrs of data which I reduced down to about 20 or so (a good guess, I haven't actually checked how much data is included in this photo below). The following 3-4 nights I spent collecting LRGB data as I was really curious to see how an LRGB data set of an emission nebula would look from bortle 6/7 skies. I was hoping to grab another 25 hours or so.. but alas.. I had adjusted my camera settings for my narrowband flats and forgot to change them back to shoot LRGB. I spent the final two nights re collecting my data using the right settings and my goal at this point was to simply grab RGB data for natural star color.

Post processing this dataset was tricky. My sii data suffered from mottling due to the imperfections of the 294mm's sensor. This was a real pain to process out. My ha data looked clean as did my Oiii which was a relief. I managed to collect 8hrs of Sii/Oiii and 14hrs of HA. I was entirely unsure how to approach this data set. I wanted to produce something unique. Something a bit different than my standard SHO colored mages. It started off rough but I was able to reach a result that I am more than happy with.

I think this is to date, one of my better photos! I spent a lot of time carefully sharpening the incredibly bok globules within NGC 281. This nebula has so much dimension and depth that I felt that not demonstrating this through my image would be sacrilege.

I encourage you to explore the full resolution! I hope you all enjoy it!

Equipment:
Sky-Watcher 10" Quattro
asi294mm Pro
iOptron CEM60
Astrodon 3nM ha/oiii/sii/LRGB
Exposure time: 30ish hours
Bortle zone: 6/7