A soso Christmas tree, cone nebulae

[fmeireso]

A soso picture... Culprit was the moon. She was horenduous shining, high up, far over half as i remember and far more then i bargained for..

I used a L-enhance filter but was anyway struck with some big halo forming in the stack.. I could not get it out. Wipe could not, DBE in PI neither. It did a fine job though but killed too much nebulosity of the Christmas tree.
After many trials i used GraXpert v2 from out Pixinsight in a linear stage and then processing this in Startools to get the image below. It is still a bit visible at the right, the left side was pretty much completely solved. GraXpert is not the ultimate solution , as i discovered. It really did a fine job in this case, but in other cases, like IC 410 i tried i merely destroyed the image. Well, in that one there was not much gradient afterall so ..

Taken with a TS APO 130 mm with FR , F5.6. TS branded Touptek color cam. Certainly i want to redo this on a better night or nights,if i still get the chance. 4h45 of integration... processed in Startools and some tweaks in GIMP, HOO approach, allthough not much blue is to be seen....

NGC2264Gimp (Large).jpg (444.18 KiB) Viewed 837 times

[Mike in Rancho]

Hey Freddy. Strange.

Maybe it's an illusion and the structure is just "that way," but I think I can see a big ring all the way around.
I imagine you are spot-on about your big moon. Do you attach any kind of moon shield to keep its light from angling across the OTA open end and making one side (of the lens cell or dew shield) glow?

I don't think it counts as any kind of real gradient, so not sure extraction is going to do anything. Likely baked in. Query if even the UnCals could make it go away. It's "real" signal you captured, just signal you didn't want.

[fmeireso]

Well Mike, the structure is partly that way if you look at many pictures on Astrobin. This was the difficulty. The halo produces by the moon somehow got totally merged with the nebulosity. there was no way to tell where the nebulosity ended and the halo started somehow. Wipe neither DBE could solved it. GraXpert did the best job allthough it is still a bit noticable. It was the best i could get. I knew at full moon it would be a problem , even with the L-enhance, but i wanted to image anyhow, cause , well it was a clear night..;