The Rosette Nebula

In trying to improve or learn something new with every image my goals/aims for this image were:

- Framing and composition 
- Improve upon my processing of stars, particularly star colour
- Process for a dusty/moody look rather than bold colours and saturation. 


Framing and Composition
In a brief exchange with @Timothy Martin & Nic Patridge they mentioned using the golden ratio/mean to help with composition. I had heard of the rule of thirds but the golden ratio was new to me. I did a little research and attempted to compose and crop this image with the golden/Fibonacci spiral using an overlay in Lightroom. I would like to thank Tim/Nic for all the help and advice. I made an attempt at it, perhaps your wife could critique and let me know if I've got it all wrong 

Star Processing & Colours
I've never been too happy with the stars in many of my images, especially compared to some of the great images on here. 

To help with that I captured a separate stack of shorter unfiltered subs in the hope of retaining some star colour and used that to replace the bleached white stars from my narrowband stack. Thanks for the advice @Nicholas Gialiris

I also recombined using blend modes in Photoshop rather than PixInsight's PixelMath which I find often messes with my colours and brightness. 

I still think my processing of star fields has huge room for improvement but  I'm much happier with the result.

Dusty/Moody Processing
So many great images of the Rosette Nebula are posted each day, many of which have beautiful saturated colours. I still wanted to process as a bicolour image to achieve some colour contrast but I tried to go in a different direction and achieve a moody, stormy look to the nebula. I think being more understated with the colours and saturation is more my style. 


Challenges
Some of the usual astrophotography gripes on this one. Imaged over three nights but I couldn't get great guiding. It was probably sufficient given my pixel scale but my 12 year old EQ5 could probably do with an upgrade eventually. I found the moon was more of an  annoyance than usual, maybe it's the time of year but I put an early end to a couple of nights as I decided the subs I was getting were far too washed out.