This is from data provided by a friend. He imaged this in early 2022 from a telescope in Texas and was kind enough to share the data with me. This data was both a blessing and a curse. The hydrogen alpha and sulfur II were amazing. The oxygen III ended up being unusable.

Alnitak, the bright star just above the Flame Nebula is very, very bright. It’s the leftmost star in Orion’s Belt so it’s easily visible to us. It’s so bright that it often causes problems to imaging systems. The H and S data were unfazed by Alnitak’s glare but the O was fairly well trashed. There were flare and reflection artifacts that extended through at least 75% of the frame and though I could tame them a bit, I couldn’t tame them enough to be happy, especially when the other data was so good. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to try processing the image using only the H and S data. The O data didn’t have a lot in it. and really nothing that wasn’t also in one of the other two filters. The question was how to do it. After a few false starts, I used a PixInsight script Narrowband Hue Combination that let me colorize each filter. My goal was to the the emission around the Horsehead to be red since that’s it’s natural color and try to ge the Flame as much as possible salmon color as I could as that is it’s natural color. I couldn’t get it exactly but I got close and a little Photoshop work got me the rest of the way there. So, the colors in this image are not real but that’ true for all narrowband images. But, they do approximate the true color appearance but the image gets there in an unconventional way.

Though Alnitak is easy for us to see with our own eyes, the Horsehead and Flame are tough to see visually in small telescopes except from very dark skies. But, they are easy to image – well, except for Alnitak’s raging light.

This is 115h 20m of HS data. You can find the technical details on astrobin.