This rich area of the sky is heavily obscured by interstellar dust. This gives an overall dusty brownish cast to the image, common with both CCD and film images. The dense open cluster on the left is NGC6520, a 7.6th magnitude cluster 6 arcminutes in diameter and 60 known cluster members. The dark "hole" in space to the right is a dark nebula B86. It is about 4 arcminutes in size, and heavily obscures the background stars. The brightest star inside the nebula is just above center, at magnitude 10.8.

Instrument:  12.5" f/5 Home made Newtonian
Platform:  Astrophysics 1200 QMD
CCD Camera:  SBIG ST7E w/Enhanced Cooling
Exposure:  LRGB = 60:20:20:20 (Synthetic Luminance)
RGB Combine Ratio:  1: .95: 1.8
Filters:  RGB Tricolor
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing FMHW = 3.5 arcsec, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  16 C
CCD Temperature:  -15 C
Processing:  Maxim DL, Photoshop, AIP4WIN, PW Pro.

HOME   GALAXIES     EMISSION NEBS     REFLECTION NEBS   COMETS     GLOBULARS     OPEN CLUST     PLANETARIES     LINKS