Tis the season to be jolly, freeze your rear off out in the cold, and spend way too much on astronomy releated presents. Oh yeah, and to celebrate Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Ashura / Etc. What better way to celebrate when you are an astrophotographer than to image the Christmas Tree Cluster, NGC 2264:
This is one you need to spend a little time with, in my case 36 200sec (2 hours) images were combined with 25 darks and carefully stretched in Pixinsite to create a wonderful image full of colors, dust clouds and dark lanes. Notice the Cone Nebula over on the right side. I would love to spend more time on this target and get some more detail out of it, there is way more here than I had originally thought.
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