Cone Nebula Wide Field - SHORGB - ASI1600MM - Skywatcher Esprit 80 - Paramount MyT - Voyager Advanced (Rowland Archer)

Cone Nebula Wide Field - SHORGB - ASI1600MM - Skywatcher Esprit 80 - Paramount MyT - Voyager Advanced

This wide field view of the Cone Nebula in Monoceros was taken over 15 nights from March to October 2021. Yes, I'm that far behind in processing data :-).

This is a fascinating star-forming H II region with tons of swirling gas and dust clouds. The "cone" is an absorption nebula and the bright nebula behind it is energized by S Monocerotis, the brightest star in the Christmas Tree cluster, NGC 2264, also captured in this image.

My processing flow was as follows:
- Calibration with SiriL and gess
- Pixinsight:
- WBPP
- GraXpert on the automatic crop of all frames
- RGB channel combination
- BlurXterminator on RGB - Correct Only (thanks Adam Block and Russ for this hint as to how to use BlurX before SPCC and then again after)
- ImageSolver, then SPCC of RGB
- BlurXtermintaor of RGB - Correct First
- NoiseXterminattor on RGB - .55 strength
- SHO combination in NBColourMapper script
- StarXterminator on both RGB and SHO
- NoiseXterminator of SHO
- Extract S, H, O channels from SHO starless, and R, G, B channels from RGB starless
- Combine S, H, O, R, G, B with NBColourMapper
- HistogramTransformation of SHORGB and RGB stars
- HDRMT and LHE on SHORGB followed by Curves to increase contrast and color saturation
- Add RGB stars to SHORGB starless with PixelMath ~((~starless)*(~stars))
- Save to 16 bit TIFF
- 3DLUTCreator
- Add contrast and saturation, "bend" greenish color to blue

Fascinating that with the new tools from Russ Croman, the GraXpert team, and NBColourMapper my workflow is done with about 80% tools that didn't exist a year ago!

Final
Original
B
C

B

Title: Zoom to Center

Description: Just a zoomed in image to highlight the Cone nebula and NGC 2264

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: Starless version - SHORGB

Uploaded: ...

Narrowband imaging
Suburban Astrophotography
ZWO ASI1600MM/QHY163M
Imaged with Voyager

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8987134
PixInsight job	WON88H7QXHK11MVM1D9GFS0KI5NX6XTC
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	06h41m34s.10
RA (top/left)	06h45m15s.33
RA (top/right)	06h43m11s.73
RA (bottom/right)	06h37m51s.69
RA (bottom/left)	06h39m56s.68

Dec (center)	+09°41′16″.8
Dec (top/left)	+09°02′39″.5
Dec (top/right)	+10°43′38″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	+10°19′47″.1
Dec (bottom/left)	+08°38′47″.1

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