A rock, a feather and a planetary Nebula.

[ollypenrice]

Stephen O'Meara's Messier Objects guide describes M47 and M46 as being like a rock and a feather. The 'Feather,' M46, also contains the tantalizing little planeatary, NGC2438. They make a nice visual target in which the PN is easy in small scopes. One of our present guests, Mike, wanted to image something which made use of our southern location so we went for these clusters down in Puppis. Nothing fancy, just an hour per colour in the TEC 140. The seeing wasn't great at that low elevation. Click on the image and the full size button will be lower left.

Olly

 

[gnomus]

Very nice.  

[toxic]

very nice indeed

[wimvb]

Nice "snapshot". Plain, but with a really nice composition.

Thanks for sharing

[swag72]

I have to say that I find clusters and this sort of thing rather boring when compared to nebula's and the like - But I can certainly appreciate the skill in processing all of those damn stars!! So I would say a skilled rendition, but boring for me on a personal level  

[cfpendock]

I really like stars on this (like most of your images).  But is there another (very small) purple nebula about halfway between MGC2438 and the top of the image?  Or what is it?

Chris

[mikeyscope]

Great image and nice crisp star images, even some detail showing in NGC2438 ....I would be happy with those seeing conditions overhead from here in the UK! 

 

Quote

I really like stars on this (like most of your images).  But is there another (very small) purple nebula about halfway between MGC2438 and the top of the image?  Or what is it?

Chris

The Little purple planetary is  PN M 1-18 .........there is also another tiny blue  planetary off to the right of that which is... PN G231.1+03.9 but doesn't show too well at this scale, it would be visible in a full resolution crop section. 

Mike

[ollypenrice]

9 hours ago, mikeyscope said:

Great image and nice crisp star images, even some detail showing in NGC2438 ....I would be happy with those seeing conditions overhead from here in the UK! 

 

The Little purple planetary is  PN M 1-18 .........there is also another tiny blue  planetary off to the right of that which is... PN G231.1+03.9 but doesn't show too well at this scale, it would be visible in a full resolution crop section. 

Mike

Thanks for that. I'm glad we didn't invent them...

Olly

[johnfosteruk]

This is terrific, I've been binging on open clusters lately and this is just absolutely the reason why, so very majestic, beautiful and interesting. Loving the PN too. What a lovely bonus. Terrific image.

[Martin Meredith]

I love these clusters. You've also got a bonus cluster, NGC 2425, just half way between the two. M46 is 3x as far as M47 and this little one is  nearly 3x further again. Its also one of the oldest clusters, at over 2 billion years, compared to M46 (250 million) and the young whippersnapper M47, a mere 70 million. So quite some depth in this shot in various senses.

Martin

[ollypenrice]

3 hours ago, Martin Meredith said:

I love these clusters. You've also got a bonus cluster, NGC 2425, just half way between the two. M46 is 3x as far as M47 and this little one is  nearly 3x further again. Its also one of the oldest clusters, at over 2 billion years, compared to M46 (250 million) and the young whippersnapper M47, a mere 70 million. So quite some depth in this shot in various senses.

Martin

Thanks Martin. Interesting info.

[PatrickGilliland]

Nice Olly, hard work to make clusters interesting sometimes, achieved that here though!

Paddy