December Stargazing: Christmas Tree Cluster, Learning Veralux

Best target in December? Definitely the Christmas Tree Cluster! The best Christmas gift for an amateur astro-whatever like me? Veralux Hypermetric Stretch. Where to celebrate Christmas? Under a Bortle 4 sky, watching the stars – or clouds.

Christmas Tree Cluster (NGC 2264)

Located in Monoceros, the stars and the dark Cone Nebula arrange themselves into the perfect silhouette of an evergreen tree – pointy top, wide base, and all. It’s a great example of how our brains are wired to spot familiar shapes in the cosmos, kind of like seeing a face in the clouds. Pretty festive for a stellar nursery!

New DSO targets while playing tag with the clouds in Fenqihu

I celebrated Christmas in Alishan and Fenqihu hoping for clear skies… The first night in Alishan was unproductive because of the clouds, but the second night in Fenqihu was a bit better, giving me 5-20 minute patches of clear sky to target new DSOs. Read my post on how to get there and things to do.

• NGC 2261 or C46, Hubble’s Variable Nebula in Monoceros
• M1, Crab Nebula in Taurus
• IC443, Jellyfish Nebula in Gemini
• NGC 2207 & IC2163, a pair of colliding galaxies in Canis Major

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Learning Veralux Hypermetric Stretch

When this dropped in the Seestar Facebook Group, as usual, I didn’t know what it would do but installed it anyway and followed the steps shared in the group – and voila! I realized what it did: it stretched the data that was already there in less time than I spend dragging hyperbolic lines. I went back to previous targets that I knew had a pretty good amount and/or quality of data and reprocessed them to see how much Veralux could extract.

M33, Triangulum Galaxy

M42, Orion Nebula

C92, Carina Nebula

NGC 2244, Rosette Nebula

Here’s my workflow in Siril:

1. Naztronomy to stack
2. Crop, plate solve, color calibrate in Siril
3. Graxpert script to denoise
4. Veralux to stretch the data
5. Asinh to increase the black point / Hubble Palette to see other possible interpretations

I was blown away by the results! Indeed a pretty good gift, especially for an amateur like me! What do you think?

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Stay tuned for more stargazing location hunting in Taiwan!

🌹