After shooting the Flaming Star and Tadpole Nebulas together in a wider field shot a few weeks ago, I decided to return and capture the Flaming Star solo in a tighter shot. It’s been a bit chilly here, and my equipment wasn’t fully cooperative, but I managed to get about 4.5 hours on it, which is enough for what is a relatively bright object. I’m going to return to this data in a bit, because I’m not fully satisfied with the outcome, but I’ll share a few in process photos. The photo above is a reprocess into the HOO palette. As part of the process of generating that photo, there are some intermediate steps, or easy forks that I also thought looked nice.
One of the first things I do is to remove the stars and stretch the image. Here’s what that step looked like.
Here is that same image with the stars added back in.
And the combined image, just in the luminence layer.
Sweetman Astrophotography 
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