The giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the "Cosmic Reef," because the nebulas resemble an undersea world. The sparkling centerpiece of NGC 2014 is a grouping of bright, hefty stars, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. By contrast, the seemingly isolated blue nebula at lower left (NGC 2020) has been created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The blue gas was ejected by the star through a series of eruptive events during which it lost part of its outer envelope of material. I took 240 x 5-minute subs (20 hours) using the Antlia ALP-T Dual band filter using my Celestron Edge HD 11-inch telescope and ZWO294MC-Pro camera. I also took 60 x 1-minutes subs (1 hour) using the Optolong L-Pro filter in order to capture RGB stars. I processed by splitting the RGB channels and converting to Ha and OIII using the formula given by Carlos Valerino, and then used the TheColdestNights equations (
www.thecoldestnights.com) to make a Foraax palette image. I incorporated a Luminance image using LRGB Combination. This area is an intense star formation area with large star numbers, so I used Bill Blanshans Pixelmath star reduction method to significantly reduce the stars.
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