NGC 2264, The Christmas Tree Cluster, Fox Fur Nebula, and Cone Nebula – March 20, 2018

My first H-alpha deep sky shot in a while…

This time a first session with a lovely area with a multitude of names…

To correctly show this region of sky a multitude of sessions will be required, so this is just a third of the H-alpha acquisition for now. At least two more sessions are required with my setup. This time the sky quality was very low, with poor transparency and a limiting visual magnitude of only +4.

Equipment: Teleskop Service 65Q F/6.5 APO Refractor, ASI 1600MM, Baader 7nm H-alpha filter. Only 20x300s frames, Gain 200, binning 2×2. Two darks. Guiding via PHD and a 50mm Finderscope with the ASI 174MM. Manual dithering after each frame.

For now a false-color rendering; I keep the black-and-white version for when it will be all done. Maybe an HaRGB version will follow…

Part of processing (more data added): normal stars and “less stars”. I do this as part of my processing workflow, but the result looks interesting, with the shape of the nebula more evident:

My last version of this H-alpha image, with 32 frames in total, each a 5 min sub, under +4.5 mag skies.