Well, better than I feared. Maybe this is the best way to describe this next LRGB trial. I knew when I pointed my scope to this area that it will be a tough task and not necessarily a masterpiece, to achieve that, the conditions around my backyard are just not good enough. I read several posts before that LRGB in LP areas is actually not that bad, I really have to disagree with this, I would bet quite a bit that the same image with the same integration times under dark skies would be a completely different result (as shown by others here on AB!). Of course more integration time would have helped as well, but with the weather in February and March this year there were not many opportunities.

Furthermore, I cropped this image down to the main target for now, I am still working on a wider field view, the myriads of stars make that one a difficult processing challenge. And the color gradients are of course a nightmare. The bad part with that is that there are also (as seen in this image) nice darker areas, and gradient removal just destroys it. Have to come up with a nice mask to prevent that those gradient removal tools kill the image (which it did!).

Not a Sharpless nor a Messier target 😊😊, they will be back with the next images.

And before I forget: IMHO the 5 minutes exposures gave again more and better signal than using 2 minutes exposures. I actually tried the same nebula last year with 2 minutes and as you can see (or not see), there was no post of this trial, since it was not presentable.