M37 in Auriga

[gnomus]

This is my first image of 2017.  2 hours each of R, G and B captured on the nights of 1 and 2 January 2017:

[cloudsweeper]

Great image!  I'm very fond of M37 - was looking at it only last night.  And its companions M36 and M38 are not far behind it in appeal.

Doug.

[BXRO]

Nice pictures, looking at these three last night myself just visual though a 130mm F5 reflector a 20 mm EP and a UHC filter. Nice to compare what I saw last night with a real time photo the next morning

Thanks

[coatesg]

Nicely done - love that deep red carbon star on the right

[gnomus]

Thank you for your comments.  

45 minutes ago, coatesg said:

Nicely done - love that deep red carbon star on the right

How interesting.  I occasionally see these in my images.  I usually assume it's an error in my processing somewhere, and so I generally dial down the saturation on these as I did here.  Perhaps, I should leave well alone!!   

[gnomus]

This version might have a shade more 'sparkle' (it also restores the carbon star).  Finally, I ran another round of SCNR because I thought I still saw some green in the original.

[Barry-Wilson]

Lovely sparkly M37.  Serene.

Makes me think I need to do more clusters .

[swag72]

You've certainly got this star colour malarkey well and truly licked  Looks great Steve

[abhoriel]

beautiful star colours

[Jannis]

Very nice and clear, and love the colors. great work!

[wimvb]

Great cluster. I also thought that those occasional red stars were a byproduct of processing, so I will treat them with more respect in the future.

[Trevor N]

Very nice

[gnomus]

Thanks all for your encouragement.

 

[coatesg]

Second version looks great - more "punch" which is lovely - and you certainly got the deep red from V358 Aur  

(I find always worth checking those stars in Simbad - odd colour stars sometimes indicate things like nova, supernova, variables etc (as well as user errors...!) esp where the images are taken over a long period - that's how I found the designation for that one last month!  

[gnomus]

 

2 hours ago, coatesg said:

Second version looks great - more "punch" which is lovely - and you certainly got the deep red from V358 Aur  

(I find always worth checking those stars in Simbad - odd colour stars sometimes indicate things like nova, supernova, variables etc (as well as user errors...!) esp where the images are taken over a long period - that's how I found the designation for that one last month!  

I'll need to look into Simbad.  I have a vague memory of a film with Tom Baker and Jane Seymour - is that what you are talking about?

[PatrickGilliland]

Nice work Steve - pretty sparkles are always good.  Nicely done though and prefer that latter version.

Paddy

[gnomus]

Thanks Paddy.

[gorann]

Yes, a very beautiful image!

(although I am more of a nebula and galaxy person for which stars can be a pain)

Good to hear that I am not the only one that wondered about those odd red stars and if they really existed or were artifacts. I think I left my red carbon stars alone so far and I will for sure do so in the future.

[coatesg]

On 04/01/2017 at 12:57, gnomus said:

 

I'll need to look into Simbad.  I have a vague memory of a film with Tom Baker and Jane Seymour - is that what you are talking about?

Ha!

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/

Easiest way is to use Aladin and then do the lookup from there. If not listed specifically as a carbon star, the B-V magnitudes from catalogues give a good idea of how red they are (more +ve means redder).

[gnomus]

13 minutes ago, coatesg said:

Ha!

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/

Easiest way is to use Aladin and then do the lookup from there. If not listed specifically as a carbon star, the B-V magnitudes from catalogues give a good idea of how red they are (more +ve means redder).

Thanks for the link.  I had a brief play on the site.  I put in M37 on the website and was presented with an image of the object.  I was able to zoom in and out of this image, but it offered me no additional information.  In other words, although I could find my carbon star (in the image I was presented with) I could not see how you could discover its name.  It might be me, of course.  What is the purpose of Simbad?

Steve

[coatesg]

Broadly, it's a method of looking up objects (by identifier, or by a location based search) and retrieving information on the object. This may be magnitude, object type, etc, or could be a reference to a paper that references (or catalogues) the object.

So if you use Aladin (aladin.u-strasbg.fr), you can search by identifier to bring up an image of the object, zoom in/out etc. and then do a search in Simbad from Aladin and overlay the results onto the image. If you plate solve your own image (eg using nova.astrometry.net and embed the solve into a fits file (nova will do this for you )  you can even load it directly. Best a worked example:

Here I've searched for M37 in Aladin (you can load a solved fits file here instead if you can solve an image and resave with the updated fits header information - nova should let you do this). The carbon star is at the bottom just left of center - the image is a DSS image.

Next, we'll query Simbad and overlay: File > Load Catalog > Simbad database

Use "Grab Coords" to click around the object you want, then hit Submit.

 

 

This overlays the simbad results onto the image - there is a square because the cluster has obviously been well studied within that region and has a lot of references to objects (eg variables, binaries, etc):

Now we can click on the item (with the select tool) and view the info:

Clicking on the "Main ID" entry takes us to the Simbad webpage with all the info on the object we want to investigate, and we find the various names, and links to catalogue data, etc.:

 

Hope that makes sense....!

 

[ollypenrice]

The two hardest things to get right in an astrophoto, in my view, are the stars and the background sky. That does not make clusters easy!!!

Nice job.

Olly

[gnomus]

@coatesg  - what can I say?  Thanks for explaining that all so clearly.  I will have a go and let you know how I get on.  I really appreciate the time you spent putting your example together.

Steve

[gnomus]

18 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

The two hardest things to get right in an astrophoto, in my view, are the stars and the background sky. That does not make clusters easy!!!

Nice job.

Olly

That is extremely nice of you to say so, Olly.  

[coatesg]

No worries! Aladin is a really useful tool - I use it a lot, even if just checking out framing, objects etc. Let me know if you get stuck!