Christmas Day has begun with a nice present, a clear dark sky. In fact the sky tonight seems to be exceptionally dark for my site; maybe that's because most businesses are shut down in anticipation of the Christmas holiday.
Unfortunately the seeing is rather poor. This could be partly the result of all the smoke in the air from many of my closest neighbors' fireplaces. If it ain't light pollution, it's smoke pollution, I guess when you live in an urban area you take the bad with the good.
Not to sound too negative though, I have been enjoying several hours of imaging already after an enjoyable Christmas dinner celebration at my in-laws home. It will be an early day around here in the morning as well, since we will continue our celebration with many more relatives. The kids will rise early to see what Santa has delivered (I have yet to spot him in the scope though), and even though I'll probably be groggy from the astronomy work, it will be a fun day. We need that to balance some of the bad stuff that's been happening around here recently, including an apparent hawk attack on one of our pets - but that's another story.
Tonight's primary target was chosen based simply on its name. NGC 2264 is an open cluster known as "The Christmas Tree Cluster" due to the appearance in a small telescope. The bright star, S Mon, forms the base of the tree and the top is at the tip of the upside down cone shape, which is aptly named "The Cone Nebula". It's not as easy to pick out the tree on a CCD image as it is to see it visually.
Also present in this image is additional nebula known as The Foxfur nebula. The whole region is too large for my chip to image in a single frame.
I'm still taking data as I write this, but this is what I have quickly processed so far, consisting of 15x10 minute images with an H-Alpha filter.
My best Merry Christmas wishes go out to all!!!
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