I got a night with fairly good skies as the summer heat and haze slowly dissipates to re-visit one of my favorite objects in the sky. I've opted for using the L-Extreme on this one which does give really nice contrast. I still see some minor halo-ing on some of the brighter stars which became evident on splitting off the star layer with StarNet. I had to play a few games with Morphological Transformation and CloneStamp to clean up, but I wanted to have muted stars here in this image anyway so the nebula can be the star of the show.
It is certainly not a perfect result, but I like it. It's a definite improvement over my last year's attempt,
https://astrob.in/irfobo/C/, which was acquired using an old Ha filter that wasn't the greatest. And I think there's a little room for further improvement next year if I get the chance.
I've also done some playing with false-color dual-band to narrowband renditions that I am uploading as revisions. Honestly, the narrowband coloring really is endless - I generated about one hundred different versions and finally decided I just had to stop. The SHO one looks pretty good and I think highlights some of the interior structures well. The HOO one I made by re-balancing the channels with CurvesTransformation to get more of the steel-gray color blend. I'm less sure I like that one yet, but it's interesting.
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