Starfish Cluster M38

[timc]

Attached is a photograph of the Starfish Cluster (Messier 38, NGC 1912) in Auriga.  M38 is an open cluster and lies about 3,500 light years away from us and has an angular diameter of 20 arc minutes (roughly 2/3 the size of a full Moon).  Another open cluster, NGC 1907, can be seen in the 4 o’clock position in this image.  However, the two clusters are not related and are merely on a ‘fly-by’, having originated in different parts of our galaxy.

I imaged this target on the night of 9 January 2021 from my back garden observatory in Oxted and the photograph consists of the following sub-exposures: L 30x120s binned X1, RGB each 30x120s binned X 2 giving a total imaging time of 4 hours.  I used a Televue NP101is (4 inch) refractor at f/5.4 mounted on a Paramount MX using a QSI 690 CCD camera and Lodestar 2 guide camera.  Image capture was done with Maxim DL and I used CCD Stack2 and Photoshop CS5 for further processing.  Thanks for looking.

Tim C

[JR]

Hi Tim

Good to see you managed to get some imaging time in with this long spell of uncooperative weather.  That is a great image particularly the colours you've managed to preserve and bring out.  Any tips on how you do that?

The Messier objects have good potential for imaging but are easily ignored in favour of the narrow band.  They are often not easy targets, eg the globular clusters and larger galaxies.   Keep going!

James

Sent from my iPad

On 21 Feb 2021, at 10:41, timc <tcos...@gmail.com> wrote:



Attached is a photograph of the Starfish Cluster (Messier 38, NGC 1912) in Auriga.  M38 is an open cluster and lies about 3,500 light years away from us and has an angular diameter of 20 arc minutes (roughly 2/3 the size of a full Moon).  Another open cluster, NGC 1907, can be seen in the 4 o’clock position in this image.  However, the two clusters are not related and are merely on a ‘fly-by’, having originated in different parts of our galaxy.

I imaged this target on the night of 9 January 2021 from my back garden observatory in Oxted and the photograph consists of the following sub-exposures: L 30x120s binned X1, RGB each 30x120s binned X 2 giving a total imaging time of 4 hours.  I used a Televue NP101is (4 inch) refractor at f/5.4 mounted on a Paramount MX using a QSI 690 CCD camera and Lodestar 2 guide camera.  Image capture was done with Maxim DL and I used CCD Stack2 and Photoshop CS5 for further processing.  Thanks for looking.

Tim C

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<M38 Cluster TV101 QSI690 BB February 2021 Final.jpg>

[trevsie7]

Tim, that is a lovely double cluster. Just wondering how you added the spikes using a refractor? Are they artificial? They are very effective.

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[tcos...@gmail.com]

Thanks James and Trev for your kind comments. These open clusters make wonderful targets and are relatively easy to image with short sub-exposures. It’s nice to be able to image a target in one night, especially given the weather we’ve been having! The spikes were added with a Photoshop add-in called Noel Carboni’s Actions. There are a lot of different actions which can be used at the touch of a button – a bit like running a macro in Excel. I bought a licence years ago (not very expensive) but mainly use it for putting artificial spikes on stars. That works quite well with clusters such as M38. It would be a pretty odd refractor which produced spikes in real life 😊. They are the preserve of Newtonian scopes which have a ‘spider’ suspending the secondary mirror in the optical tube.

Cheers

Tim C

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