NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster (David McClain)

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

NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster, David McClain

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NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster

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NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster

A proper color calibration against M31, showing a clear mix of ionized Hydrogen (pink-magenta), dust (orange), and reflection nebulae (white). This image used an optimized L-channel to control the mix.

The deep red color arises from a mixture of dust scattering and ionized Hydrogen.

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Revision: Now that I have experience with true LRGB systems, I can see that my ATIK OSC does not perform at the spatial resolution of a non-CFA sensor. The new version is completely reworked by splitting the CFA channels after calibration. Each CFA channel is flattened to remove sky gradients, registered, then integrated into separate CFA channel masters. Each master is then MURE denoised, then the masters are merged into a new Bayered image.

At this point, I produce a VNG color image, split the RGB channels to form an optimized L channel, proceed as a normal LRGB combination. Now we have 2x resolution, where we are only entitled to 1x spatial resolution. So we downsample by 2x to form the final image.

Working at 2x resolution with a VNG color image, then downsampling by 2x, produces a much better image than by working at 1x resolution with a superpixel deBayered master. I think this is because we are not fully as bad as 1x in spatial resolution with a CFA sensor, but not as good as 2x.

After downsampling by 2x, the resulting master needs one round of ACDNR to remove induced chrominance noise. Looks good.

Original
B
C
Final
D

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1062591
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster

NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster

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Image Index:

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NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster

NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster

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