In February 2022, my initial attempt to capture an image of this deep sky object using a budget-friendly 80mm scope and limited integration time yielded a predictable, poor outcome, as evidenced by the attached image. In fact, the difference between then and now is almost comical.
I'm thrilled to now 2 years later be able to share what I believe is a beautiful and acceptable image of this Nebula.
To post process this photo, I merged a 15h5m stack captured in dual-narrow-band light with a 6h40m unfiltered stack, in order to preserve the natural RGB color of the stars. In photoshop, I first create a starless version of the stretched narrow-band layer and the screen blend the broadband layer with stars on top.
Then I apply the necessary levels, curves, color correction and noise reduction until I arrive at a point where I am happy with the result. I must've wen't through a dozen edits of this before I finally reached that point.
UPDATE 02-18-2024
After adding several more hours of integration and doing a complete reprocess of the image, this has easily become one of my personal favorite astro photos I have ever captured and created. I decided to try a new trick when editing and used a layer mask to selectively "dim" the stars certain areas of the nebulosity such as the hydrogen alpha region leading up to the rosette core, this helped showcase the fainter parts as the star field was less dense.
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