The Rosette nebula is a challenge to image and process because it has long been a favorite of astrophotographers and there are many examples of well captured and processed images of this iconic beauty.  I can only hope that this image does it justice. In a wide-field,  the stem, Cone, and Christmas Tree nebulas add to it's beauty and shows how it is all inter-connected.  As a bonus I was able to pull out some details of SNR G206.9+2.3.  I hope to get more O3 next year and improve on the SNR.    

This image almost didn't come to be, as I was using this object to debug a new ZWO AM5 mount and had a lot of guiding errors that were eventually debugged to a loose guidescope.  But at the end of that I was able to salvage the good exposures and process it into the image that you see today.  Captured mostly in Coastal San Diego (bortle 6/7) with some data salvaged from a darker site in the desert (bortle 3/4).

Initially this was processed in Pixinsight using Bill Blanshan's NB_Normalization process but for some reason I was unable to realize the full potential of the shadow detail (even when using the Ha channel for CIELab lightness).  So I ended up using the tool to get the rough color and then I created a synthetic Lum using the Ha data and then did a tried and true LRGB blend.   

The deemphasized stars were a challenge due to the short focal length/wide FOV yielding an image scale of ~5"/pixel.  The aperture blades of the Rokinon 135 also create spikes around bright stars.  So I put in a lot of effort to try and get more natural looking stars, with reasonable color and halos.  After trying a lot of suggestions online, I stumbled onto my own process that seems to work well. Unfortunately some of that gets lost in downscaling the image into something shareable here, but hopefully you like the result.  

Thanks for viewing this and taking the time to read this description.