This is my second narrowband target in SHO. I captured it over the course of 7 nights during September.
I tired a little "softer" processing with less dominant colors for a more natural look. In spite of it being a bright and "easy" target, you wouldn't believe how long the processing took me Getting the right color palette sure is a tough thing... but the most challenges came because of the processing workflows with APP & PS. I wanted to denoise and individually stretch each channel on it's own, before using APP's "combine RGB". But that means I have to export it as TIFF and process it in Photoshop - only to reimport it as 16bit TIFF in APP (with hopefully the same color space). But for 16bit Tiff I had to find new palette-seetings compared to 32bit FITS and even after hours I couldn't quite get the same result... In the end I ended up with four different versions:
- FITS based (all channels same stretch, no preprocessing)
- FITS based (... star size reduced)
- TIFF based (different stretches, denoised and starless)
- FITS based RGB (star size reduced)

The next trouble came when combining RGB stars (or just their colors) to either a starless or a star-reduced SHO, without loosing the fine spikes. The whole processing took over 3 days and a lot of my nerves. In the end it became chaotic mixture of all of the mentioned versions But the good news is that I found a pretty good way of extracting RGB stars even with their feint spikes in PhotoShop.
I still have a little tilt in my sensor and some issues in my RA-tracking (as well as some reflections... things will never get boring I guess). But all in all I am satisfied with the result (even if it looks like a quick 1 hour processing instead of 3 days xD ).

Nevertheless, this object will be my experimenting basis for my first PixInsight processing, so stay tuned for another Revision.

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The Elephant's Trunk Nebula is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region IC 1396 located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away. The piece of the nebula shown here is the dark, dense globule IC 1396A. The bright rim is the surface of the dense cloud that is being illuminated and ionized by a very bright, massive star (HD 206267 - in the the top center of this image). The entire IC 1396 region is ionized by this, except for dense globules that can protect themselves from the star's harsh ultraviolet rays. The combined action of the light from the massive star ionizing and compressing the rim of the cloud, and the wind from the young stars shifting gas from the center outward lead to very high compression in the Elephant's Trunk Nebula.

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I will use the next days of typical northern-german-weather to train PixInsight. After that I want to work on my very first mosaic.