This image is the culmination of 18 months of effort to image Sh2-114 'The Flying Dragon Nebula'. I was drawn to the Flying Dragon for it's aesthetic value but didn't give much thought to how best to capture it's beauty. I wrote an APT imaging script in mid 2022 and made Sh2-114 the prime focus of my September 2022 trip to Cherry Springs. The
resulting image was something like 6 hours of RGB data that did a great job of capturing stars but almost totally missed any nebulocity. After talking to Kurt about
his image of Sh2-114, I realized what I was missing was Ha data. To plug the gap, I used the script I had written in 2022 and again made Sh2-114 the main subject of my September 2023 trip to Cherry Springs. This time though, every frame was taken using an L-Extreme filter. The resulting 6 hours of data now revealed the hidden Dragon. With no RGB data, the stars were washed out and unatural looking so I still didn't have the result I wanted. Remembering I had good RGB data from the previous year, I set about combining the 2023 nebula with the 2022 stars. Given how overpowering the stars were from 2022, this was no easy task but it was a simple mistake that gave the eurika moment. I saved the 2022 image after a quick STF stretch but forgot to lock in the stretch in with Historgram Transfomation so the image that came into PhotoShop was unstretched. Very few stars made it through but they were round and natural looking. After a light stretch of the 2022 data I was able to successfully combine the two data sets together giving the result I had been chasing.
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