Tuesday 21 April 2020

NGC 2264 The Christmas Tree Cluster

The image was taken under moonless sky conditions with only light pollution to contend with.

I was using an 80mm refractor at f/6.3, a Vixen Atlux mount, PHD autoguiding and an Atil 383L CCD camera with a set of Astronomik narrowband filters.

The total exposure times were 40 min using an OIII filter, 40 min using an SII filter and 4 hours using a H-alpha filter.

Ten min sub-frames were captured with matching dark-frames and combined with Flat-fields to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image.

NGC 2264 Bi-colour image

Closer views


Hubble Palette

Hubble Palette plus RGB

Narrowband luminance, RGB colour