Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Monoceros (Mon)  ·  Contains:  15 S Mon  ·  B39  ·  Christmas Tree Cluster  ·  NGC 2259  ·  NGC 2264  ·  PK201+02.1  ·  Sh2-273  ·  The star 15Mon
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NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster in SHO of course, Aaron Freimark
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NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster in SHO of course

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster in SHO of course, Aaron Freimark
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster in SHO of course

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Description

This is — nobody will be surprised — the Christmas Tree Cluster. It is visible only around December 25, plus or minus three months. :-)

Last night was finally clear enough to complete this image in time for Santa. My version has false colors (nebula aren't often green) but is especially festive. The SHO palette has never been more appropriate.

Process — which leans heavily on Darkarchon's EZ Processing Suite:

1. WeightedBatchProcessing, Subframe Selector, Star Alignment, Local Normalization, Image Integration, Drizzle Integration, Dynamic Crop

2. EZ Decon on Ha

3. EZ Denoise

4. EZ Soft Stretch

5. EZ Star Reduction on SII to reduce bloat

6. Histogram Transformation to brighten SII & Ha

7. PixelMath to combine grayscale narrowband images to SHO

8. EZ Star Reduction

9. SCNR 50% to reduce massive green to a hint of green

10. Curves Transformation to darken low L, boost colors, and diminish saturation

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