The Elephant Trunk has long been on my agenda of popular objects to image.  While my main objective was to capture as much sharp detail on the Trunk structure as my equipment and observing conditions permitted, I also paid a lot of attention to the RGB stars.  My stars objectives were to avoid bloating, to split the triple and double stars above and to the right of the main structure, and avoid halos on bright stars.  Therefore, I reduced star exposure times to only 30sec, calibrated the RGB image with SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration, and then did a large number of tiny stretches using GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch to bring out the small stars while reducing halos around the large ones.

This is one picture where the orientation made a difference and became much more dramatic when rotated from portrait to landscape.  I was tempted to crop the top part of the picture, but decided on balance to leave it alone.  

After a lot of culling of SHO subframes with SubframeSelector and NormalizeScaleGradients I was left with 173 subs (SII:61, Ha:55, OIII:57) or 23.1 hours of 8min exposures at gain 139dB and camera temperature of -10C.  Data acquired from backyard observatory over 11 nights between September 20 and October 22, 2023.  Integration of stars was 132 subs or 1.1 hours of roughly equal amounts for each filter during October 18 & 22.  Flat frames for calibration were acquired through a ground mounted tracing panel with a home built controller linked to the new SGP autoflats wizard.  

Processing was in Pixinsight using my now standard workflow starting with WBPP, NormalizeScaleGradients, careful use of DBE and ABE to remove light pollution gradients, SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration using the Gaia database, and deconvolution (manual PSF), star extraction and noise reduction with the RC Astro AI suite. GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch was great in balancing the highlights with the fainter background detail.