NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula located fairly close, in stellar terms, at 1,000 light years away, lurking at the edge of a larger molecular cloud. What's immediately striking about it is not only the large blue reflection, but the abundance of dust and coalescing stars, which show up as red and orange Herbig-Haro objects, or hot jets of glowing gas from newly formed stars. The handful of orange highlights you see here barely hint at the intense rate of star formation occurring:  enveloped in the mass of dust here are actually hundreds of newborn stars, with likely many more on the way.  

From a processing perspective, I wanted two things out of this image, both of which were somewhat mutually exclusive: 1) bring out the structure associated with the dark, faint dust, but 2) don't blow out the highlights of the reflection nebula and generally retain the dark vibe of the object itself.  This was easier said than done. For the first element, this object is way darker than I thought it would be, so I knew I needed a lot of integration time if I wanted to bring up the dust and not get overwhelmed by noise, so I went all in at 36 hours.  Frankly, I think it could benefit from more--it's still noisier than I would like.  Still, the detail is there once I stretched the data. 

When I did that first stretch to grab the dust, it completely trashed the second objective.  So I needed to do some careful masking and blending of a lower stretch (and HDRMT versions) to preserve the detail of the reflection nebulae within the cloud.  This took a few iterations to get to a place that felt right.  From there I used a tiny bit of dodging and burning in a few targeted areas in photoshop just to keep the contrast where it needed to be / make sure I wasn't losing detail. 

At this point, I can't think of anything else to do with it, so I'm putting it down.  This one has literally been on my list for years, so I'm really happy to have completed it.  As always, all commentary / critiques are welcome.