The Christmas Tree cluster and Cone Nebula (Ben Hakala)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Monoceros (Mon) · Contains: 15 S Mon · B39 · Christmas Tree Cluster · Hubble's variable neb · LBN 899 · LBN 902 · LBN 911 · LBN 912 · LBN 922 · LDN 1609 · LDN 1610 · LDN 1613 · NGC 2259 · NGC 2261 · NGC 2264 · PK201+02.1 · Sh2-273 · The star 15Mon

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The Christmas Tree cluster and Cone Nebula

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The Christmas Tree cluster and Cone Nebula

A rich nebulous region containing dark nebula, emission nebula, star clusters, active star forming regions, etc. Located in the constellation Monoceros which is near the constellation of Orion. The Christmas tree cluster of stars is very young (about 1 million years old) and the cone nebula itself is still actively producing stars.

This image is created using a monochrome camera using narrow band filters Hydrogen, Oxygen III, and Sulfur II. Added to this is data collected with Red, Green, and Blue filter combined in Pixinsight using the NBRGBCombination script.

Acquired

Dec 4th data from Lmuma Creek on the Yakima River, Washington

Dec 23rd data from Bainbridge Island, Washington

Processing Notes for Astro Imagers

I experimented by reducing the amount of the Ha in the Green Chanel in NBRGBCombination so that I did not need to remove the green later, I think this helped the image quality quite a bit. The detail in the SII then read a lot like the Hydrogen does in an HaRGB image despite the fact that this is a SHO image which puts the hydrogen in the Green channel. I brought back a lot of the detail from Hydrogen by using it as Luminance for this image. Also I brought out a lot of color in the stars from the RGB data during the conversion to non-linear image by first using ArcsinhStretch followed by two MaskedStretch operations followed by curves. Because of the narrowband I skipped all of the normal color calibration steps, but I did use LinearFit on the monochrome channels before converting to color.

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4121096
PixInsight job	8LEQGOEYZEWNTCWRHDF9VTE8Z26AOVTA
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	06h39m59s.99
RA (top/left)	06h33m09s.87
RA (top/right)	06h40m10s.32
RA (bottom/right)	06h46m48s.41
RA (bottom/left)	06h39m48s.81

Dec (center)	+10°09′03″.0
Dec (top/left)	+10°36′31″.8
Dec (top/right)	+08°24′32″.8
Dec (bottom/right)	+09°41′02″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+11°53′30″.3

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The Christmas Tree cluster and Cone Nebula

The Christmas Tree cluster and Cone Nebula

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The Christmas Tree cluster and Cone Nebula

The Christmas Tree cluster and Cone Nebula

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