LBN628 - a hurtling beast in Cepheus

[Fegato]

During the clear spells in January I was largely focused on targets around Orion and Perseus, but I also needed some targets late in the night when my sight lines here make the milky way too low for imaging. I picked some areas where I thought I might pick up some dust, but probably nothing too interesting. But this one turned out to a bit more than that.

It's an area of Cepheus near to Polaris. I guess this is mostly galactic cirrus aka IFN, but there are some quite thick patches more like molecular clouds. There's a sense here of some sort of beast hurtling out of the clouds to the right. The beast's head is I think LBN 628.

My subs suffered from quite a lot of passing faint cloud and mist, and this led to quite a problematic set of gradients. A very careful DBE session did quite a good job, but there were still some issues with dark red and green areas due to my fairly intense stretch. So I also had to reduce colour saturation a bit, which gives the end result a slightly monochrome feel, albeit with some colour in the stars and perhaps still a hint of the gradient problems.