M44 - The Beehive Cluster
Bright open cluster in Cancer
Uploaded 3/6/23
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Dominated by blue and
golden supergiant stars, this brilliant star cluster was so large,
that I have not been able to capture it in its entirety up till
this point. This is the first shot with our new Starizona Nexus
field flattener, which also has a 0.75x magnification. The effect
is to make my 10 inch f/3.9 astrograph into a 10 inch f/2.9 which
is a stop faster! Stars are perfect pinpoints right to the edges
of this 2 degree frame.
The background in this
hour long exposure is filled with tiny faint galaxies - Hundreds
of them. Using Cartes du Ciel atlas, I was able to overlay the
galaxy plot (second image) and find that galaxies and stars to
20th magnitude were easily recorded. Shooting at the zenith and
at 5150 feet elevation helped of course!
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Negative image with galaxy plot overlain from
Cartes du Ciel atlas. Besides galaxies, two
18th magnitude asteroids are marked "A".
Select an image size for a larger view:
1600 x 1200
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Instrument: 10" f/2.9 Orion Astrograph Newtonian with Nexus 0.75x coma corr.
Mount: Astrophysics 1200 QMD
Camera: Color CMOS OSC
Guider: ASI mini w/80mm piggyback refractor
Exposure: 60m ( 5 min subs)
Location: Payson, Arizona, Elevation: 5150 ft.
Sky: Seeing FWHM = 2 arcsec , Transparency 9/10
Outside Temperature: 25 F
Image Processing Tools:
Maxim DL6: Calibration, Color Conversion
PixInsight: Saturation Curves, , stacking
Photoshop CS2: Curves, Color Correction, Gradient removal (Grad Xterminator), Cleanup
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