Bubble Nebula and around

I took a narrowband image of the Bubble Nebula and surroundings (a two image mosaic):

(click on image for full resolution)

Because of the image scale, there is a lot of detail here:

     

Bubble Nebula

NGC 7510 - an open star cluster

     

Outer arm of Sharpless-157

Core of Sharpless-157

NGC 7538

Apart from the long exposure time (23+ hours), it took me a long time to process this image:

• I used a more elaborate preprocessing in Pixinsight, using weights, drizzling (and ran into some issues that turned out to be a bug in the ImageIntegration script)
• merging the images to a mosaic (and an issue to align the individual frames)
• I needed to use both HRDMultiscaleTransform to get details in the brightest areas of the image, and also LocalHistogramTransformation to get details in the other parts of the nebulae
• and finally using LayerMasks in Photoshop to fix local issues of a process (instead of trying to create a specific mask in Pixinsight) - for which I had to figure out how to transfer images from Pixinsight to Photoshop and back

But it was worth the effort!

... and finally I had to figure out how to upload this large image to Blogger ...