IC443, The Jellyfish Nebula

I really didnt think I would be able to capture this.  By all accounts that I've seen online, this is an extremely dim object.  Although I didnt capture the entire nebula, I got a fair amount of it.

The skies have been cloudy, or the temperature has been way below normal this winter, I have been unable to image as much as I'd liked.  Because of that, I think I'm getting rusty.  Although this is a good image, I shot about a dozen frames to get 4 good ones.  I had a number of problems imaging this.  The scope was unbalanced, because the little refractor is so light weight that the tripod counterweights were too heavy to balance.  When I imaged with the object ascending the meridian, everything was fine, but when it was descending, the stars streaked.  Polar alignment was pretty good that night.  I was able to capture only 2 frames with the scope ascending before I had to do a meridian flip.  I did manage 2 decent descending frames out of 10.

This image was the raw monochrome, stacked and enhanced in Photoshop.

Here is the same image using Noel Carboni's  'B&W -> Ha False Color Black Space' tool in his toolkit.

I went back and reprocessed this with some dark frames.  Seems the darks increase the noise.  The only reason I used them was to eliminate the hot pixels.  I seem to like this image better than the above.