Chance to spend a couple of nights in Bortle 1/2; what's best to focus on?

Broadband imaging, whether galaxies or diffuse galactic cirrus/dust/IFN is up to your preferences. I'd plump for the latter since B6/B6+ skies aren't that prohibitive for galaxies in my experience.

Thanks guys.

I would go hyperstar and go for dark/reflection nebula.  In other words targets that really benefit from dark skies.  Narrowband and galaxies I would not focus on.  What is the location?

Whenever I have been lucky enough to be in a similar situation (in my case from B7 at home to about B3 on vacation)  what I could image while away was still limited by  the weather.  So the imaging decision came down to sky position and  if the weather would hold out for long enough to finish anything off.  So I went for the galaxies in order to image their outer fainter forms so as to later combine these data  with images of the core taken from home. If I had thought about I also would have gone for some OIII narrowband of some of the fainter more interesting nebulae since that too is quite limited by LP.  Tim

I think that OIII might be the exception there. At least where I am the LED lighting throws out lots of light in that band but not so much up at SII and HA.

Rho Ophiuchi region

Pretty low on the horizon for me (never > 20° or so), but I will surely keep that in mind - it does look beautiful; thanks for the suggestion.

Rho Ophiuchi region

Pretty low on the horizon for me (never > 20° or so), but I will surely keep that in mind - it does look beautiful; thanks for the suggestion.

An alternative can be the squid and bat nebula in Cepheus...

LDN43 is indeed at the top of my list at this point.

I would target IFN regions and dark nebula. If you are really going to be under ~22mag/sq" skies, best time to go as fast as you can (f-ratio wise) with broadband filters and get as much signal as possible in these faint, hard to capture structures. There should be plenty of both up in the sky right now, now that we are into summer.

It is also not a bad time to capture some nebula as well. There is a lot going in in most nebula regions, and often things that narrow band filters can't pick up. Faint white and blue reflection nebula all over the place is a big one. Narrow band images just don't really capture these reflections as they are usually from light off the narrow band emissions. Imaging this stuff under 22mag/sq" skies would be pretty fun. LOT of brighter emission nebula often have a lot of these reflection nebula scattered all about, but its pretty rare to see them. They are not that easy to capture, and harder to capture well enough, with strong enough signal, to really show them off, and they pretty much always need broadband filters or OSC. Hyperstar would make these rarer sights even easier to capture. Could be quite an eventful couple of nights!