Ghost Nebula (SH2 -136)

I started gathering data with my standard 600s sub exposure duration.  However, having accumulated quite a few of these, I decided this wouldn't give me enough detail, so I increased this to 1200s subs in the Lum which made a substantial improvement to the image quality. I also discovered that the nebula contains some bright stars which are so intense that they pushed my camera into the non-linear region for the 600s and 1200s lum subs. So, to overcome this, I decided to take some 60s Lum subs and then created a high dynamic range Lum image within CCDstack by combining the 60s, 600s and 1200s stacks and rejecting all the pixels that where above my cameras non-linear threshold.  

On the processing front, I struggled with the background since it contains so much dust and numerous red/yellow stars.  I eventually decided to de-emphasize some of the dust and red stars since too me they proved distracting to the main subject, namely the Ghouls in the nebula. 

L: 60s x 41, 24 x 60s, 12 x 1200s, R: 18 x 600s, G: 13 x 600s, B: 21 x 600s. DARKS: 30, FLATS:40, BIAS: 100 all at -20C.