This is NGC 281, the Pacman Nebula, shot in broadband with the objective of bringing out the dusty surrounds. I was inspired by an image posted earlier this autumn to have a go at this, but sadly can't find it to provide credit (memo to self - must bookmark when that happens!).
Conditions were more than poor for this, with 20mph winds and gusts of 35mph or more, so it was perhaps a bit foolhardy to roll the rig out and image... but so few clear nights! Guiding often hit 2" RMS, but the rig stayed upright, and with 30s exposures, I stuck on the one target much longer than I normally would, and managed to use just over 1 in 3 of the resultant subs. Processing I found a bit tricky. Firstly bringing out the dust while containing the bright nebula took some care, and despite a lot of careful use of masks, in the end I resorted to HDRMultiscaleTransform to get the Pacman back to something less puffy. I also had issues with colour balance, even after being very careful with SPCC / BN. I guess the level of stretching involved maybe causes some of this, but my red channel was just too weak once I got well into non-linear processing, giving a very blue/green tinge to everything, which I've corrected as best I can.
After processing, I was intrigued by the little group of reflection nebulae and perhaps star forming areas above the Pacman, and found that one of these is DG6. I'm indebted to
this image by
@Antonio F. Sánchez, taken over 10 years ago, for spotting that the surrounding dust looks a bit like a horse! (there seem to be a few horses up there, don't there? - my third at least!). So I've added a little horse crop as a revision image!
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