Capella et al from tonight

[StargeezerTim]

Taken with modded 100d, 50mm 1.8 lens at F 2.5. 16 X 5 sec plus calibration frames. Stacked in DSS and processed in photoshop.

Taken in my garden at about 6.20 pm. Capella is top right with polaris to its left, i think. There is cluster above and between the two I have identified (NGC 1502, I think!) but a small nebulous smudge below and between Capella and Polaris. Anyone know what this this is? I've looked in stellarium and cant find any DSO's nearby!

Edit... I think I am wrong about polaris being in the image, which also makes my ID of the open cluster wrong! The only thing I am sure of is Capella...

[wxsatuser]

First off you did'nt capture Capella.

The bright star to the right is Alnath and bright star left of centre/top is Theta Aurigae.
The top cluster is M36 and bottom one is M37.

[StargeezerTim]

2 hours ago, wxsatuser said:

First off you did'nt capture Capella.

The bright star to the right is Alnath and bright star left of centre/top is Theta Aurigae.
The top cluster is M36 and bottom one is M37.

Well spotted! Is there an easy way of identifying stars etc, a programme you can drop images into that will identify them?

[wxsatuser]

Suppose there are plate solvers but I just used a star atlas and your description of the area.
Once I identified the two bright stars the two clusters were easy.

[wimvb]

Nice capture.

As for plate solving; there are several options, but the easiest one I found is uploading to Astrobin. It will do the platesolving for you.

If you have PixInsight, it has an image solver as well.

 

Cheers,

[paul mc c]

Not sure of the orintation of polaris,but the smuge could be comet Catalina maybe....