Beyond gorgeous, well done

Figured today is an appropriate day to post this. This nebula is also known as NGC 2264 I’m fairly certain the christmas tree is the entire nebula when the photo is inverted, and not just the cone nebula at the very end of it. Captured on November 17th, 2022, from a Bortle 4 zone.

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr | Instagram |

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Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 4 hours 2 minutes (Camera at half unity gain, -15°C)

• L- 62x120"

• R- 20x120"

• G- 20x120"

• B- 19x120"

• Ha -47x300" x 2 panels

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Processing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• SubframeSelector

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

Linear:

• DynamicCrop

• automaticBackgroundExtraction

• EZ Decon

• NoiseXTerminator

Stretching Luminance:

• MaskedStretch to 0.1 background

• Starnet++ starmask made, subtracted from 0.3 Gray image and colvolved

• Previous image used as a mask to stretch nebulosity without stretching stars

• Normal HistogramTransformation

RGB Linear:

• Channelcombination to combine monochrome images into RGB image

• SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration

• SCNR green

• HSV Repair

• ArcsinhStretch + HT to bring nonlinear

Nonlinear:

• LRGBCombination with stretched luminance

• Shitloads of CurveTransformations to adjust lightness, saturation, contrast, hues, etc.

• Extract L --> LRGBCombination for chrominance noise reduction

• More curves

• SCNR to remove some background greens

• LocalHistogramEqualization

Two rounds of this. one at size 16 for the finer ‘feathery’ details and one at size 500 for large scale structures

• ColorSaturation

• even more curves

• NoiseXTerminator

• EZ Star Reduction

• noise generator to add noise back into star reduced areas

• MLT for chrominance noise reduction

• Resample to 60%

• Annotation

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