NGC 2264 - Christmas Tree Cluster - OSC Bicolour image

[Zummerzet_Leveller]

Following on from my last image of Auriga which was a sea of red I thought I'd give @tomato 's advice a go and follow the @Luke Newbould Siril bi-colour approach.

I slightly varied it to remove the stars first and then denoise the Red and Green channels before combining again.  This is 5.5hrs of 180s exposures using the l-eXtreme on Thursday 10th of Feb.  The blue channel was toast due to the moon.  Taken on the EQ6R-Pro with my SW200P and the ASI2600MC-Pro with the l-eXtreme.

Stacked in DSS.  Initial Siril process for background and then stretch.  StarnetV2 for star removal, stars layer created in GIMP.  Siril again for channel separation of starless.  R & G channels denoised in Topaz, back to Gimp to convert back to greyscale then RGB composite in Siril as per Luke's processing tutorial.  Image then switched to GIMP to get to this one.

As always constructive comments and criticism are welcome.  I'd like to get more data on this target to reduce the amount of noise reduction needed but the weather is pants!

[Luke Newbould]

Nice job mate!! really creative use of the tools available, worked out well 🙂

[Zummerzet_Leveller]

2 hours ago, Luke Newbould said:

Nice job mate!! really creative use of the tools available, worked out well 🙂

Thanks Luke, still a bit grainy for my liking, more data and less moon would help I think.  The moon was at 71% and only 40 degrees away and the Siril background extraction struggled a bit.  I like to make life difficult for myself, one day I'll relent and buy Pixinsight but actually enjoy the challenge of jumping around in freeware (Topaz excluded).

Pretty sure I won't remember the steps I took to get to the above image, I must start writing this stuff down! 🧐