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Wild Duck Cluster (edited version added)
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Excuse my ignorance, I opened this expecting mallards or some such; never knew this was a sky feature, which part of the sky is this in it looks a great shot.
Wee Man
Hi Weeman.
It is in the Southern part of the Milky way. It’s an open cluster which is approx 6’500 light years away, which makes it appear as a fuzzy star to the naked eye. This was a 20 minute exposure (40×30 sec) blended together. I may have gone a bit overboard with the processing, but I wanted the cluster to stand out from the background of thousands of other stars. :)Thanks forty exposures have you a system to keep the camera aimed at the same position?
I use an AstroTrac mount, which works pretty well if properly aligned & is not overloaded. It is more portable than a proper telescope mount, but it won’t support a heavy telescope / camera setup. I usually end up with a small bit of drift between shots, but I use software to correct any alignment errors. Having small differences can actually help to eliminate sensor noise & hot or dead pixels.
I decided to use a blend of 16 of the clearest exposures & re-processed to give a more subtle image
That’s a lot clearer, is this just stars grouped in an area of the sky?
Wee Man
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