NGC2264 is the designation number of the New General Catalogue that identifies two astronomical objects as a single object: the Cone Nebula, and the Christmas Tree Cluster. Two other objects are within this designation but not officially included, the Snowflake Cluster, and the Fox Fur Nebula. All of the objects are located in the Monoceros constellation and are located about 2,300 light-years from Earth. Due to its relative proximity and large size, it is extremely well studied (ref Wikipedia).
It's long time that I wanted to capture this nebula, but given the faint oxygen and sulfur emissions (this latter is really very faint), I postponed this project until I was sure to be able to show a reasonably good SHO result. As a matter of fact, to capture these emissions I pushed for 600s subs in Bin2 (OIII and SII) and this was a game changer, which enabled me to detect very faint color transitions revealing the incredible complexity of the structure on all the emissions. For the Ha channel I wanted to capture very faint details, which I achieved by increasing the total exposure to >17h on Ha. I was happy to see very faint structures around the cone, as well as on the Fox Fur region. I applied BXT on the stacked Ha image after optimizing the light/contrasts. The end result is a slightly but not massively sharper image for which I did not really observe artefacts. Possibly this is linked to the high quality of the details generated by the long exposure and the relatively bright Ha emission.
For the stars, I generated a classical 3x20x60sec RGB combination (17/20 selected), however I noticed a bad tilt on the NP127is for which I am not yet successful on the correction. So, upon meridian flip I shooted a second 3x20x60s RGB series and then combined the two correct half frames. Not an ideal solution, but at least I obtained a reasonable result. As I am not very happy with the brightest stars, I added some cosmetic arrangement with StarSpikes (I know, a refractor does not generate diffraction spikes).

Don't hesitate to comment my image.

CS,

Nicola