Cone Nebula and Christmas Tree Cluster - one shot colour

[Ouroboros]

My latest attempt here learning how to use my ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO OSC camera. 96 x 120s subs.  Skywatcher ED80 with 0.85 reducer. AZ-EQ6 mount + ASIair plus. Guided. All processing in Pixinsight.

Not sure about my efforts here. The image doesn’t compare with some of the filtered shots of this target with mono cameras I’ve seen on SGL of late.  The red nebulosity it seems is quite faint for this target and I’ve had to push both curves and colour saturation somewhat to bring it out.  More data would have have helped.  I had just over four hours worth of data but sadly had to throw a fair few away. It was the evening of the 26 February and we were still experiencing the windy tail end of storm Eunice.  So quite a few subs had eggy stars due to wind shake.

[Stuart1971]

Great image, a very star rich area, and they can take over the image a bit, I have the QHY version of this camera, and I only use 2 min subs with the narrowband L-Extreme filter, so with no filter you could try reducing the sub time down to maybe under 1 min, it will stop the stars taking over so much and so drowning the nebula…

what Gain setting are you using..?

I hope you don’t mind the advice…👍🏼

[Ouroboros]

@Stuart1971 Advice very welcome, cheers. Using this camera with the ASIair there are only two possible gain settings: 0 or 100. I’ve been using only gain 100 because the dynamic range is still reasonably high and the noise is less as I understand it. I now can’t recall why I settled on 120s. I think it was after reading some discussion of this on SGL and looking at Robin Glover’s video. Maybe I should rethink that. I’d have to take twice as many 60s subs and I’m already seeing quite long processing times on my aging MacBook.   I’ve been wondering whether to get myself an L-extreme filter. I have to say the skies are pretty dark when they’re clear in the part of north Cornwall I’m in so I like to take advantage of that. They were pretty crystal on the night I took this image. 

[Ouroboros]

Hello again …. I tried reducing the star size with morphological transformation (MT) in Pixinsight. It looks less dramatically reduced here in jpg than it did on my screen in Pixinsight. I applied this MT to the final processed image, but is it better to apply this (or some other star reduction process) earlier in the processing chain?