A Cluster Night

[WolfieGlos]

So the endless cloud seems to have cleared for, allegedly, the whole of the coming week down here, and of course that falls right on the period of the full Supermoon 😬

I had been collecting data on a broadband target prior to the Moon period, so I decided that rather than waste the clear skies I would image some star clusters instead. Always good during full Moon's, I decided to go for NGC 457 (The Owl - with the inclusion of NGC 436 at the bottom of the frame) and of course the double cluster in Perseus. I last imaged the double cluster on my Evostar 72ED over a year ago, and the difference in optics compared to the Starfield 102 is clearly noticeable.

I lost 10 frames on the Owl due to high level clouds which I only noticed when coming to stack - long streaky lines were too obvious! Both were supposed to be 90 minutes of integration so the Owl ended up as 80 minutes. Dithered every 3 frames.

Comments/criticism welcome 🙂

Canon 800Da + Starfield 102 + HEQ5. No filters.

Both stacked in ASTAP and processed in Siril, AstroDeNoise and GIMP.

80 x 60s @ ISO-400:

90 x 60s @ ISO-400: