Monday 2 September 2013

Double Cluster in Perseus

Keeping on learning about astrophotography I decided to give a try to my first deep sky object. I'm using a DSLR (Nikon D3100) and a "lidlscope" (Meade ETX70-AT). This modest equipment, joined to my almost none experience,  gave me this image of the Double Cluster in Perseus (Also know as Caldwell 14) formed by two open clusters NGC 869 and NGC 884 located at a distance from Earth of 7500 light years.



This image was composed with 130 light frames of 1 second exposure at 3200 ISO, 20 dark frames and 20 bias. All of them stacked using Deep Sky Stacker and processed with Photoshop and Lightroom. Currently the ETX horizontal engine is broken so no tracking was used in this image, thus the exposure has to be kept to 1 second to avoid star trails.

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