NGC 2264 - The Christmas Tree Cluster, Cone Nebula and Fox Fur Nebula.
From constellation-guide.com -
The Christmas Tree Cluster is a young open cluster located in the constellation
Monoceros. It is part of the NGC 2264 region, along with the
Cone Nebula and the
Fox Fur Nebula, and belongs to the Monoceros OB1 association, a loose association of very young stars located in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.
I had 4 clear nights in a row with no moon so I imaged for about 4 hours per night, by 11:30 I was shooting into the trees.
I did NGC 2264 in January 2021 with a ZWO294MC Pro color camera with a city light filter and the results were unimpressive at best. Narrowband filters would have helped but I only had the city lights filter. The mono cameras create more work but my images have improved.
The starless version - I did less processing and I left it in its original orientation, the fox head can be seen more easily. I really like the starless version, probably because you can see the nebula without the distraction of the large stars. I believe I can improve my stars with better collimation. I will be working on my telescope and with some luck I may get tighter stars in the future.
I was surprised to see so much blue in this image. The integrated Oiii images showed a fairly large area of blue without much structure, but the blue showed up nicely on the final image.
Can you see the ghost riding the dragon ? It is just to the right and above center and is looking to the left. I also see a demented looking skull under the ghost and it is looking to the right. The more I stare at this image the more I see.
I created SHO and ForaxX palette images from Ha, Oiii and Sii. I then combined the two images with PixInsight's PixelMath with 30% SHO and 80% ForaxX. The SHO image showed more detail but the ForaxX image had better color, so I use more ForaxX. The stars came from an image created with Red, Green and Blue filters, the stars were then removed with Starnet2 and combined with a starless SHOForaxX image using PixelMath.
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