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The image above is a reprocessing of the same data shown below. This is an unmodified SHO palette while the one below does tweak the colors somewhat. The major difference is this version uses a tone mapping process that processes the stars separately from the rest of the image. While it isn’t perfect (there are some residual effects from an imperfect star removal), it produces a much better effect than the previous version.

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The Wizard Nebula (NGC 7380) is another one of those nebulae where I can’t figure out how it got its name. I don’t see anything remotely wizard like about it. However, it’s still a very interesting nebula.

This is presented in a modified-SHO palette. The normal SHO, also known as Hubble, palette puts Sulfur in red, hydrogen in green and oxygen in blue. Many people like to shift these images toward the blue and I though I might do that with this image but when I tried I ended up with this which is actually closer to the original colors but I ended up liking. It created this layers of color that were visually interesting though I don’t know if they say anything structural about the nebula after my changes.

The smoke out west ended up causing me to throw away half the oxygen, more than a quarter of the sulfur and an eighth of the hydrogen. There was still enough to process it well fortunately but it was disappointing to lose so much data.

For the technical details, see the astrobin.