M38 - A Dusty Cluster

[PhotoGav]

Messier 38

Here is my attempt at the open cluster, Messier 38, located about 4200 light years from Earth in the constellation of Auriga. Seeing as it's nearly Christmas, I've thrown in an extra open cluster, NGC 1907, just to its right. M38 is also known as 'The Starfish Cluster' and while I've thought to myself, 'mmm, that looks a bit like a starfish' when admiring the cluster visually, I have to admit that this deep image doesn't do much for its starfish-ness, just too many stars perhaps?!? What I wasn't expecting was the amount of dust going on in the field of view. I know that Auriga has some spectacular nebulae, but didn't realise how close they must be to M38, despite no Ha filters being used, there is plenty of the red stuff in evidence here. Makes sense I suppose, given that stars are the fruit of dust clouds, so dusty space = lots of stars, eventually.

Technical Details

Esprit 100ED, HEQ5 Pro for the first third then Mesu 200 for remainder, QSI 683 with Baader 1.25" for first third and then Astrodon 31mm.

LRGB = 36 x 300s each
TOTAL = 12 hours

I hope you like the image and I await your thoughts and comments on it. I am intrigued to know what people think of the colour / colour balance as my last few images have been slightly off at first attempt and have needed a bit of a tweak. Have I got this one right? I've ummed and arrred about it quite a bit, but it is a pretty reddish area of sky, I think! Which is rather good, given that Christmas is a rather reddish time of year...!

[tomato]

Well, it looks pretty good to me. After attending your excellent talk at Lucksall, I tried out the star colour calibration tool in APP, and this seems to work well on most of my images. However, I guess it might not work as well on non neutral backgrounds like this one? Did you use it on this image?

[Sunshine]

Thats no attempt, thats a bonafide success of a shot, beautiful!.

[PhotoGav]

37 minutes ago, tomato said:

Well, it looks pretty good to me. After attending your excellent talk at Lucksall, I tried out the star colour calibration tool in APP, and this seems to work well on most of my images. However, I guess it might not work as well on non neutral backgrounds like this one? Did you use it on this image?

Thank you. Glad you enjoyed the talk and got something out of it! I did do a version of this with APP star colour calibration, but didn’t go with it as it seemed to drain the colour from the image. I fiddled with all the sliders, but couldn’t get a better result. Normally it works very nicely. It did a good job with the stars, but the red dust lost its intensity and I decided that I didn’t want that to happen!

31 minutes ago, Sunshine said:

Thats no attempt, thats a bonafide success of a shot, beautiful!.

Thank you!

[johnfosteruk]

Nicely done Gav, next job, go wider for more faint stuff!

As for colour balance, for me you've got it pretty much where it needs to be.

[PhotoGav]

49 minutes ago, johnfosteruk said:

Nicely done Gav, next job, go wider for more faint stuff!

As for colour balance, for me you've got it pretty much where it needs to be.

Thank you John. Wider? Not with this weather!!

[johnfosteruk]

5 minutes ago, PhotoGav said:

 Not with this weather!!

Your problem, not mine

 

[Spaceade]

Great shot!

makes me want to shoot more star clusters, maybe i don't give them the attention they deserve ?

[MikeODay]

Very nice!  On my screen it has a kind of 3d feel ...