Two winter clusters to take winter away

[drjolo]

I made these images few days ago. Transparency was good under my suburban skies, but seeing was poor. I could not take my primary observing tasks, so I hopped from one to another.

Both clusters were discovered by William Herschel, and both are not imaged often. NGC1662 in Orion is closer (1400 ly) and poor with stars. There are only 30-40 of them in this cluster. Second one is NGC2420 in Gemini. This one is reacher and also more distant (about 8100 ly away). Both images were shot with Meade ACF 10" telescope, QHY163M camera and EQ6 mount. NGC1662 is 35 minutes of total exposure with RGB filters; each subframe was 60s. NGC2420 is 70 minutes of total exposure with RGB filters; each subframe was 120s. There is apparently not much interstellar matter in the NGC2420 direction, so distant galaxies peek from the background, but they require more collected photons to reveal.

I am really annoyed with this season winter weather, hopefully it will end soon...

[alan potts]

Very nice shots there, I think you have done very well indeed, as I am told a scope like that is difficult to image with, I tried my SC 12inch and it was rubbish on it's fork, may well try mounting it on the AZEQ 6 though it could be a bit heavy for anything longer than say a minute sub.

Alan

[Stu]

Nice images, lovely star colours.

[Moonshane]

Really nice images. I have not sketched the first one as far as I recall but here's my very early attempt at NGC 2420. I have inverted my sketch as it was in a newt.

[drjolo]

Thanks guys!

6 hours ago, alan potts said:

Very nice shots there, I think you have done very well indeed, as I am told a scope like that is difficult to image with, I tried my SC 12inch and it was rubbish on it's fork, may well try mounting it on the AZEQ 6 though it could be a bit heavy for anything longer than say a minute sub.

I have never used fork mount, but I have been told some of them are not particularly useful for long focal astroimaging 12" SCT is kind of monster, I think AZEQ6 can have some troubles, but for short exposures with CMOS camera it should work fine  

4 hours ago, Moonshane said:

Really nice images. I have not sketched the first one as far as I recall but here's my very early attempt at NGC 2420. I have inverted my sketch as it was in a newt.

2013 - it was also the year I moved to suburbs and got back to astronomy - it was my first hobby ever  

[alan potts]

23 minutes ago, drjolo said:

Thanks guys!

I have never used fork mount, but I have been told some of them are not particularly useful for long focal astroimaging 12" SCT is kind of monster, I think AZEQ6 can have some troubles, but for short exposures with CMOS camera it should work fine  

2013 - it was also the year I moved to suburbs and got back to astronomy - it was my first hobby ever  

I have an ADM mounting bar for it so I will give it a try some day, I intend to get something like an EQ 8 later this year, so that will do the trick. BTW really liked your M1 you posted in the last comp.

Alan

[drjolo]

Thanks! I already have also few narrowband frames for M1 - now need to put it all together.