I've been working on this one for over a month, trying to capture more and more data and then finish it off with real LRGB stars. It's been cloudy for weeks, and I had about 3 times I could get my scope out for 2-4 hours before it clouded again, but they were all before I could shoot at my target so it was a frustrating exercise in being so close to complete, but unable to finish.

The next challenge was that my stars didn't overlap well with my SHO, so I had to learn how to star align properly between LRGB and SHO and then crop, all while dealing with the fact that I've fully edited my starless SHO images. I ended up cropping some nebula out to make it work, but not much and most of it wasn't as detailed anyway.

During the month and a half I was working on this both SPCC and BlurXTerminator were released, so I got to learn how to use and integrate those into this project. I also took the time to watch and utilize Bill Blanshan's techniques for combining LRGB stars with an SHO image as well as his techniques for star reduction, both of which I had to use.

With this project I really wanted to go for the natural looking, very red view of this nebula, instead of just the standard tri-colour looking SHO image. It was hard to figure out and I did a lot of tweaking and playing with curves to get the colours to go how I wanted. I definitely have spent more time on this than any other project to date and I feel like I've learned a lot about how to really mess with curves to get colours and contrast more in line with what I'd like to see, but I've still got a ways to go. I made 4 different versions of this image, but this was the darkest and richest looking, while the others were brighter and some were very vibrant in their colour, allowing you to really see the difference between the SII and Ha data.

I'm happy with how the contrast came out in this version and I look forward to coming back to this one day when I've learned much more.

This is 28h 48m 30s of exposure across Ha, SII, LRGB.
Shot over Nov 6, Nov 7, Nov 8, Nov 10, Nov 25, Dec 1, Dec 4, Dec 13, Dec 20 2022.