M37 through the haze

[BlueAstra]

Continuing my tour of clusters I moved on th M37. (Actually, it was the only bit of sky that looked clear, and the only thing I could find in the area to go for!). C8+FR+OAG+1000D. 8x3m 800asa. Quite a lot of wispy cloud (not sure if that's the technical term) passing through. Better luck tonight maybe.

[RobH]

Yep, wispy cloud is the polite technical term

That's a nice capture...very tight round stars.

The image is quite noisy, due to a combination of the aforementioned sky, and only 24 minutes total exposure.

If you can get more exposure time, at least 30 x 3 minutes, you'll have a much smoother background and be able to bring out the interesting mix of star colour, which is already showing in the image, out more.

Well done for grabbing an image, it's really frustrating being able to see the brighter stars through the haze

Cheers

Rob

[BlueAstra]

Thanks for the advice. Never quite sure why I got so much noise, did take some darks and flats. But I guess total exposure time is king, and I should budget on more of it! Couple of nights ago managed to get 6m without too much LP, but last night 3m was max without LP washout.

[RobH]

The haze will have been a significant factor in the noise.

Clusters don't really need long exposures, so your best bet may be to go for lots of shorter ones....3 minute subs is plenty of time.

Once you get to about 50, the noise will be very low, and you'll be able to play around with the processing a lot without running into noise issues.

Signal to noise ratios are the key in astrophotography....the more you can get the noise down and the signal up, the easier the processing and the better the image

Rob