Still on a kick revisiting the popular targets that I tried last year, I did a few nights on the Wizard Nebula. These were three of the most humid nights of the summer so far, but my new dew heaters seemed to work pretty well. The third night was half ruined by intense fog, but the optics were completely dew free.
I probably should have tried to get a couple more nights of data on this, as the moon was out for most of the nights and the nebula had lots of outlying areas that were very dim and noisy. Anticipating the arrival of my new observatory, I decided to just process what I got and wait to get everything set up permanently. That should make the next target go much better.
This is a little over 15 hours of data with my Baader UHC filter. I learned a few tricks this time around. Mostly, I learned how to reduce the stars so that the target can be much more prominent. I need less sharpening and other tricks because the nebula itself has tons of detail when it is not washed out in a sea of white. I also tried doing the denoise last and in two steps for the darks and the mids. This has definitely been another huge step in my processing ability.
Here was the result last year with my dob and DSLR:
