Double Cluster from Cherry Springs

Image August 23, 2020

It will take some time to work through all the images from this last week to produce “final” products, but this is the first one. While I’ve known about Cherry Springs State Park for a long time, this was my first visit. I’m glad I went.

NGC 869 and NGC 884 near the center, NGC 957 also appears just below the midline on the right side.

This is the Double Cluster (NGC 869 and NGC 884) in Perseus, combination of 15×180 sec and 6×300 sec for a total of 75 minutes of exposure. That’s less than my 2009 image (https://astrofoto.org/…/ngc/Double+Cluster-20090820.jpg.html which is rotated 180°, whoops), but I think the optics are better for this scope (RedCat 51, 250mm FL @ F/4.9). Camera was a modified T6i, an APS-C format sensor. Taken from Cherry Springs State Park in Pensylvania. Processing was done with PixInsight, with color saturation and curve adjustments done in GIMP. I’m posting a 25% image which FB will scale somehow; the original is 6000×4000 and I’m very happy with how sharp it is.

The Double Cluster is embedded in the Milky Way, so the number of background stars is crazy which makes the cluster look at lot less impressive than it is.

I love PixInsight’s processing scripts. Instead of rejecting whole frames for satellite trails, it rejects at the pixel level for outliers. There were actually 5 satellite trails in the set of images.

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