Clear skies are few and far between, so as I wait for the smoke to settle, I turn to processing whatever data I can find that piques my interest. And what better target than M78, certainly one of the most beautiful pieces of sky that there is!

M78
M78 is the brightest diffuse reflection nebula in the Orion B molecular cloud complex, which is about 1,600 light-years from us. The M78 cloud is over 4 light-years across, illuminated by the energy of its embedded, bright blue, early B-type stars. The cloud is home to star forming regions, hosting 45 known low mass stars with hydrogen emission lines. These stars are  irregular variable T Tauri stars, in the  beginning stages of their stellar lifetimes. Associated with some of the newborn stars are  Herbig–Haro (HH) objects, which are bright areas formed when narrow jets of partially ionized gas, ejected by stars, then colliding with nearby clouds of gas and dust at hundreds of kilometres per second.
For those that want to find them all, here is the current list of HH objects near M78.

My processing
I registered and stacked all calibrated subs using DeepSkyStacker. I then applied background extraction, a development stretch (L), HDR,  initial color development, and finally Ha development as a NB accent in StarTools. In Photoshop stars were removed using StarXterminator, the nebulosity layer was deblurred using APF-R (as used by NASA), denoised/sharpened with NoiseXterminator, followed by a fine-tuning of saturation across the color space. The star layer was then added back in as a linear dodge (add) layer.

Data
Insight Observatories ATEO-1 Telescope: Dreamscope 16" f/3.7 Astrograph
Mount: Software Bisque Paramount ME
Camera: FLI Proline 16803
Location: Beryl, Utah USA (Utah Desert Remote Observatories)
104 images totaling 7.75 hours: LRGB with  respectively 22, 24, 23 and 22 subs at 300s,and Ha with 13 subs at 600s.
Dates:  2021-01-11 to 2021-02-13