NGC 2264 | The Cone, Christmas Tree, and Fox Fur (Kevin Morefield)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Monoceros (Mon) · Contains: 15 S Mon · Christmas Tree Cluster · HD261657 · HD261658 · HD261683 · HD261711 · HD261783 · HD261841 · HD261842 · HD261879 · HD261904 · HD261937 · HD261938 · HD261939 · HD261969 · HD262014 · HD262041 · HD262066 · HD262109 · HD262110 · HD262138 · HD47732 · HD47755 · HD47777 · HD47887 · HD47934 · HD47961 · HD48055 · LBN 911 · LBN 912 · And 4 more.

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NGC 2264 | The Cone, Christmas Tree, and Fox Fur

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NGC 2264 | The Cone, Christmas Tree, and Fox Fur

This area is well imaged as it fits in various small to large FOVs and can be accessed from both Northern and Southern Hemispheres. I was interested in shooting it because of the fine structures that a long FL and good seeing can reveal. The SII here is strong and reveals an area the Ha only shows weakly. That is the yellow filaments floating about two-thirds of the way up in the picture.

The mix here is a dynamic narrowband blend and yellows represent areas where the SII is strong relative to the Ha. After creating the dynamic blend for color I created a psuedo-luminance of 40% Ha, 40% SII, and 20% OIII. The OIII is pretty weak and seems to mostly be soft structures in the background so I leaned more heavily on the S and H to maximize SNR.

BXT was used on the psuedo-luminance, but since I had already removed the stars I used a manual PSF with a .42 strength. With a starless image stretching is much simpler. I used a simple STF stretch on both the SHO blend and the psuedo-luminance before combining with LRGB combine. Further stretch adjustments were done in PS with curves. I am finding that I like to run NXT after stretching to give the program more room to run without losing detail in the shadows. Maybe you have other thoughts on this?

The stars were processed separately by creating an RGB master, then applying BXT to shrink them, followed by SXT to separate them into a stars only image. The stars were then screen blended into the starless SHO in Photoshop.

Original
B
Final
C

C

Description: Fixing levels. Tried to edit this while traveling on a new laptop...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6897038
PixInsight job	XJBN0CIAWW115ETFP9UEMTHXQD1GJXB3
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	06h40m53s.579
RA (top/left)	06h41m48s.927
RA (top/right)	06h39m55s.590
RA (bottom/right)	06h39m58s.363
RA (bottom/left)	06h41m51s.961

Dec (center)	+09°36′03″.61
Dec (top/left)	+09°57′21″.87
Dec (top/right)	+09°56′50″.41
Dec (bottom/right)	+09°14′45″.55
Dec (bottom/left)	+09°15′16″.80

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NGC 2264 | The Cone, Christmas Tree, and Fox Fur

NGC 2264 | The Cone, Christmas Tree, and Fox Fur

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NGC 2264 | The Cone, Christmas Tree, and Fox Fur

NGC 2264 | The Cone, Christmas Tree, and Fox Fur

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