When I head out for an astro session when I have to work next day I usually don't plan for more than 2h net observation time. With a few minutes drive, unloading of all equipment, setup and alignment of the mount and the telescope I usually need more than an 1h before I can even start observing and I need another 30min to pack and drive home at the end. On this day the weather was sunny over the day but also quite hazy so that I didn't expect optimal conditions at all. 
I wanted to keep it easy and chose as a target the open star cluster M46 as this was likely the last time this year I could take a photo of it and it includes a nice planetary nebula NGC 2438 as a goodie. It was clear that by the end of the session M46 would be less than 15° above the horizon which is challenging even with perfect conditions under this Bortle 4 sky. 

When I got to my usual observation location the farmers were driving the same small road with huge tractors and huge 3-axes slurry tankers followed by a trail of dust and dirt. I couldn't stay there and had to move on! Luckily I found a suitable observing place just a few 100m away. But of course this costed extra time. I setup my stuff while a smelly fragrance of slurry blew around me. A teenage couple came along the way and as a good amateur astronomer I explained what I did, and no there is nothing special to see today and no, I'm an astronomer and not an astrologer and no, I don't do this as a profession and no, you can't earn money with this  and yes, I can show a few photos. It's always good to explain what you do if you want to avoid being caught by the SWAT team one night because it's most suspect for the inhabitants of a small village if some mostly unknown guy is running some weird activities in the dark and doesn't even switch lights on. 

I finally got my session running and was happily integrating my first surprisingly sharp pictures, still with tractors running down the road with headlights good enough to illuminate the International Space Station. And now chainsaws are operated in the distance! Who runs chainsaws in the middle of the night? I should call the SWAT team. So much for a peaceful and stress-free observing run. 

The later the evening the poorer the quality of my pictures got. The FHWM of the stars grew bigger and bigger. Sirius close by not at all made the impression of the brightest star of the sky.  I still decided to run this till the end of my planned 30 shots of 4min each. In the end I discarded almost 50% of the pictures.

Well, here you see the end result of 16 pictures of 4min each. It was quite a challenge to get at least some color from the stars. With StarNet++ I could process the planetary nebulae and the stars independent from each other. Especially the little PN M1-18 nebula which measures only a few pixels across and had a signal which was only a tiny-tiny amount above the noise was hard to preserve and to enhance. I also looked out for any signal from the Rotten Egg Nebula (aka Calabash Nebula) but couldn't see anything neither in the single shots nor the stacked version. Too bad.

In conclusion M46 was the wrong object, at the wrong smelly location, under the wrong sky at the wrong time with the wrong instrument. On the plus side I learned a lot about Pixinsight trying to preserve the subtle excess light from PN M1-18 and also learned a bit about GIMP, plus educated two young people about astronomy as  hobby. All-in-all not a waste of time. 

M46 is a young open star cluster about 300My old and ~5000 Ly away. The PN NGC2438 is way closer (1400 Ly) and probably has nothing to do with M46. It started to form about 8500y ago when its central star was on the asymptotic giant branch burning helium in the shell. 
There is not much info on PNM1-18, but a picture by the HST - not much more convincing than the reddish dot I shot -  is here: https://faculty.washington.edu/balick/PNIC/PNimages_by_galcoord/130.3-11.7.M1-1hst.jpg. 

Carsten