The Christmas Tree Nebula

Interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas and dust abound in this gorgeous skyscape. The 3 degree wide field of view stretches through the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264 is centered, a complex jumble of cosmic gas, dust and stars about 2,700 light-years distant. It mixes reddish emission nebulae excited by energetic light from newborn stars with dark dust clouds. Where the otherwise obscuring dust clouds lie close to hot, young stars they also reflect starlight, forming blue reflection nebulae. A few light-years across, a simple sculpted shape known as the Cone Nebula is near center. Outlined by the red glow of hydrogen gas, the cone points toward the left and bright, blue-white S Monocerotis. Itself a multiple system of massive, hot stars S Mon is adjacent to bluish reflection nebulae and the convoluted Fox Fur nebula. Expansive dark markings on the sky are silhouetted by a larger region of fainter emission with yellowish open star cluster Trumpler 5 near the top of the frame. The curious compact cometary shape right of center is known as Hubble’s Variable Nebula.

Image:

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Equipment:

  • Nikon D800
  • 600mm F4 lens
  • GEM 28
  • NINA
  • Nikonhacker

Acquisition:

  • ISO 800, F4
  • Taken from a bortle 1 zone in Northwest CT
  • 668 x s 180 3(3.4 hours) – Taken on 2/1/2022, 2/2/2022, 2/4/2022, 2/6/2022

Processing

  • Subframes were calibrated and channel-split VNG debayered using WBPP
  • Subframes were weighted using subframe selector
  • Each subframe was registered using distortion correction
  • Each channel was integrated seperately
  • A luminace was created using adaptive normalization
  • RGB channel combine + Crop stacking artifacts
  • Dynamic bacground extration
  • Photometric color calibration
  • Deconvolution on the Luminance
  • TGV denoise on Luminance and RGB
  • RGB was stretched using ArcsinH stretch and Histogram transformation
  • L was stretched using an average of Masked stretch and Histogram transformation, then a slight HDR was applied
  • LRGB combination
  • Starnet was applied to a copy of the image, then the small scale layers were removed using MMT and the dust was enhanced using LHE. This was blended back into the image
  • Adam Block-style star reduction
  • MMT sharpening to get a better star PSF and enhance detail
  • Slight saturation increase

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