NGC 2264 contains the Cone Nebula and the Christmas Tree cluster. This rendition is in narrowband, Ha, Sii, and Oiii. The colors are false in that the mapping was done to make the picture look good, not necessarily mapping each wavelength to a particular color. Here was the workflow:

1. Calibrate flats from each night with their respective dark masters.

2. Calibrate lights from each channel with their respective flats and dark masters.

3. Blink calibrated lights to reject really bad ones, usually the last 2 from each night as the scope tracks past the neighbor’s fence.

4. Run the Sub-frame selector script to reject those subs with outlying FWHM and/or eccentricity. Assign weights according to Light Vortex Astronomy’s formula.

5. Register all the images, using one of the Ha subs, or the master if available, as a reference, and generate drizzle data.

6. Integrate each channel and drizzle integrate afterward. I like to drizzle my Hyperstar data because it is under-sampled.

7. Fix the star halo around 15Mon that appears in the OIII master using David Ault’s method.

8. Crop each master equally to remove registration artifacts.

9. Perform a Linear Fit using the Ha master as a reference, and add all of the channels using Pixelmath to create a master Luminance image.

10. Cloned master Luminance image, did a quick histogram transformation to make it non-linear and ran the Starnet process to generate a star mask.

11. Binarized and convoluted the star mask and applied it to the master Luminance.

12. Generated a PSF image using the PSFImage script.

13. Applied deconvolution using the generated PSF, the star mask as the local support for de-ringing, and a range mask.

14. Applied MLT to denoise slightly.

15. Applied a masked stretch and curves transformation, and the MasterLuminance is ready.

16. For the color, I performed a linear fit on to equalize the levels of each color channel and combined them into an RGB master using PixelMath. I tried several color schemes, mapping Sii to red, Ha to green and OIII to blue and every other possible combination until I settled on Ha to red, Sii to red and Oiii to blue.

17. I then stretched using ArcSinh stretch and played with the curves until I got a reasonable result.

18. Now, I added the Luminance and cropped a little more to get the nebula centered better. I applied the same crop to all of the other masters, and exported as TIF files for final processing in Photoshop.

19. In photoshop, I did a selective color to make the colors more pleasing and saved the files as JPG.