Christmas Tree Cluster & Cone Nebula (David McClain)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Monoceros (Mon) · Contains: Christmas Tree cluster · Cone nebula · NGC 2259 · NGC 2264 · The star 15Mon · The star 16Mon

Christmas Tree Cluster & Cone Nebula, David McClain

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Christmas Tree Cluster & Cone Nebula

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Christmas Tree Cluster & Cone Nebula

Finally got an hour to go after the Cone Nebula... not at all what I expected, having seen the NASA Hubble images of the Cone. It's a little tiny thing down there at the bottom of the bright red nebular region near the center of the image.

Canon 200mm F/4.

So that tells me I need a longer focal length. That would be a good target for a 2,000 mm focal length, making it about 10x larger than shown here.

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Okay, so there are tons of field stars around the nubulae. First revision gets rid of ringing artifacts. Second revision: How about peeling them off a bit to show the underlying nebular structure in better detail?

The H-alpha guys have it easy. We are broadband in the red. The field stars are still in there, but now you have to look closer to see them. At a distance, they no longer detract from the nebulae.

I diminished the field stars by first making a star mask to isolate them from their background nebula. Then I used multiresolution support decomposition to peel away the lowest scale lengths in the star images. That acts like a low-pass filter on the stars, and the nebular regions are already low spatial frequency and also protected from the MRS by the star mask.

Original
B
Final
C

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	917750
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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Christmas Tree Cluster & Cone Nebula

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