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Saturday 19 March 2016

A Couple of Clusters

I haven't yet had the courage to try and undertake guiding with my new astro-imaging set up so I tend to limit myself to exposures of 2 minutes or less. This means I lack the confidence to try and image some of the really faint objects in the skies and tend to limit myself to the more obvious clusters etc. Recently I spent a night trying to image two such clusters, the first of these is the famous Double Cluster in Perseus. Also know as Caldwell 14 or NGC 869 and NGC 884, this naked-eye open cluster is a regular target for visual astronomy due to how wonderful it looks in a wide field eyepiece.

I have to admit I didn't spend that long imaging it because I had decided I would spend more time on it when I get a Field Flattener but I did manage to still get 27 x 90 Second exposures at ISO 800.


The lack of Field Flattener has caused some distortion around the edge of the image but the cluster itself is quite well defined. The camera has actually picked up a fair bit more colour than I have ever managed to see visually which was nice to see.

The next open cluster of the night was one which is a little less known, The 37 Cluster (NGC 2169) in Orion. What I really loved about this cluster is that when I had previously looked at it visually it actually looked like its name.

The image I ended up with is composed of 15 x 90 second exposures at ISO 800.


The image has been cropped a fair bit to increase the size of the cluster in the image, although now I can't decide if I prefer the original wider field.