2023/08/29:

Another day of clouds no solar filter, so some free time to try and get used to SIRIL and the Hubble Palette.

2023/08/07:

Its a rain day today and cloud cover again tonight, into tomorrow morning and Tuesday night, so I thought I would try and improve my 1st go at NGC 2174, I think it is a little better, so I kept the original and marked this version as final.  Later in the year I am going to shoot NGC 2174 this time with my ASI2600MCP and use the Optolong L-Pro filter.

The coloring of this image is probably off, but is close to what I have seen in some images online. I I stacked and performed initial processing in Siril, saved to tiff and then used Affinity Photo to clean the image up a little.  I used  Pixinsight for BlurExterminator and NoiseExterminator.  I am still working on learning PixInsight, so I plan to update some of the images using PixInsight once I get a handle on how it works.  Currently I am working through Adam Block's online course for PixInsght. beginners.  Anyway I hope this image is worth posting.  

NGC 2174 (also known as Monkey Head Nebula) is an H IIemission nebula located in the constellation Orion and is associated with the open star cluster NGC 2175.  It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth. The nebula may have formed through hierarchical collapse. There is some equivocation in the use of the identifiers NGC 2174 and NGC 2175. These may apply to the entire nebula, to its brightest knot, or to the star cluster it includes.  Burnham's Celestial Handbook lists the entire nebula as 2174/2175 and does not mention the star cluster.  The NGC Project (working from the original descriptive notes) assigns NGC 2174 to the prominent knot at J2000 06h 09m 23.7s, +20° 39′ 34″ and NGC 2175 to the entire nebula, and by extension to the star cluster.  Simbad uses NGC 2174 for the nebula and NGC 2175 for the star cluster. Glowing gas and dark dust do not survive well in the Monkey Head Nebula. Young stars near the center of the nebula generate stellar winds and high energy radiation that causes the nebula's material to shift into complex shapes.  The nebula is primarily composed of hydrogen which glows at infrared wavelengths due to the radiation.

@information from Wikipedia