NGC 2264 The Snow and the Cone

 

 

Had a few hours last night to image. Captured five frames 20 minutes each of Ha of the Cone Nebula NGC 2264. Used my QHY9M CCD camera & Orion ED102T CF refractor

 

The weather forecast is for snow,sleet and rain for the next week. I decided to combine my newly aquired frames with an older DSLR image of NGC 2264. Taken with a Canon T3i and Orion ST-80T refractor

I used fifteen 10 minute frames from this image to combine with the 5 Ha subs. Combined them in Photoshop

 

 

 

I'm really happy with the results considering what the image from last year looked like. I had to tone the bloated stars from the original image using StarTools. Once they were "shrunk" I used that image to "color" the b&w CCD image. I created about 6 layers and adjusted each. After flattening the image,  I added the diffraction spikes with StarTools

Tried a reprocess with more sharpening: