The weather seems to be always the same. A lot of nights were really cloudy and taking long exposures is a mess. It took me 5 tries to get a clear night, where all worked well. It is frustrating to bring out all the gear and after you realized, that there is no chance for even a single frame, put the equipment back to its storage place. I really need an observatorium. But who am I telling this? It happened to all of us frequently, didn't it?

But if you are lucky enough to get some good images and the result turned out to be really nice, it is worth all the effort. The image here is by far not perfect. The single frames were taken with an Ha-, a green and a blue filter. The color image is the result of simple channel combination (Ha=R, G=G, B=B). It may be worth trying to bring the green channel also as a Luminance layer and process the star sizes a bit, but I am really happy with the results.

The Ha images are exposed for 600 seconds, while green and blue are 300s frames. While the Ha exposures are nearly perfect, the colored frames are overexposed. 300s is too much and the result are saturated white stars. Thats sad, but the nebula is clearly the main target and the stars are not that important to me (they are, but I don't tell you).

So... lesson learned. Because there was only about 3 hours of darkness (4, if you include the moonshine shots of Ha), I decided to go for green and blue instead of SII and OIII. That way it was much easier to process a color image. Until the moon was gone and one hour after moonset, I took Ha images. Then, it took me an hour for the green and another hour for the blue channel.

Developing the final image was really simple. The processed channels were denoized, stretched and combined. There was only some color correction and bang - this came out. Great! By the way - I love star spikes and yes, it is too saturated!

Note to myself:
Next time shorter exposure times for green and blue...