Magnificent Fred.
What sets this image apart from others I’ve seen is its natural feel. You have not pushed and pulled colours or overly saturated the channels. The soft aqua hues display the intricate knots of nebulosity extremely well. It’s an impressive presentation of your work. Not unlike the pastel hues of an oil painting. Perhaps the soft colours are attributed to your composition technique. I don’t know many that use the Ha for channel luminance in narrowband imaging. Typically mapping SHO or HOS is enough, but to do HS:HO is an interesting way of processing, especially when your Ha is 1x1 and the SII and OIII are 2x2. The strong Ha data has the potential to mute the channels if the blending is strong. You may wish to try lighten mode so you keep unique features of each channel as they are blended. It does look at little over cooked, but I feel narrowband imaging is quite forgiving in this regard. Some of the stars look a little too crunchy for my liking, but no dark halos are present - always a good thing. The total exposure time of 10.5 hours delivers a high signal to noise ratio even when one considers your SII and OIII are only 2 hours each (compared to almighty 6.5 hrs for Ha alone).
While we are down for the count, why not deliver the final devastating blow with your Helix neb…
I thoroughly enjoyed the ride around this spectacular vista. Well done.
