Hi All - I have tried to capture the essence of this nebula many times over many years. A sampling of the latest effort using a new 3nm Ha Astrodon filter - I have just replaced all my NB filters with the 3nm filters. They are expensive but are showing great promise.
Thats good, you will find 3nm a big improvement and well worth the $, especially with a classic high QE cam like the ST10XME. But your processing needs to take a step up to take advantage. The image is a bit compressed and blown. A quick fiddle in PS rendered much more detail.
Wow, there is so much nebula in there I thought it was a flat frame
While, yes, perhaps the processing could have been a bit more subtle (although I can't talk) I love images like this, remind me of the amazing deep schmidt plates of the 70's and 80's that I thought were unapproachable
Bassnut - I don't use PS only Pixinsight - It is still early days with my processing skills.
Strongmanmike - I deliberately tried to push the fainter nebula out of curiosity - I was more impressed by the filters ability to suck out the centre of the nebula, which most times it is burnt out.
Multiweb - Its going to be a long project I think - the narrower filters obviously need a lot more data to control noise- though I am impressed by early results.
The original image posted was not processed it has only been given a masked stretch in Pixinsight - I wanted to see how it could push the fainter parts of the nebula - for comparison I have included the original image as it came off the camera - it has only been given a screen stretch.
Care was taken to make sure when capturing the image that none of the stars or areas of the nebula were saturated.
(although 
) I love images like this, remind me of the amazing deep schmidt plates of the 70's and 80's that I thought were unapproachable 
