Beehive Cluster
M44 / NGC 2632 / Cr 189
The Beehive Cluster is one of nearest open star clusters to Earth. Along with many main sequence stars it contains red giants and white dwarfs (which are much older stars). They are about 560 light-years away from Earth and on avarage 600 million years old.
The glory of the sun is one sort,
and the glory of the moon is another,
and the glory of the stars is another;
in fact, one star differs from another star in glory.
(1Cor 15:41)
This verse, written in the 1st century CE, can be appreciated even more in the light of modern astronomy, which shows the contrast existing as to color, size, amount of light produced, temperature, and even the relative density of the stars.
Technical details
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Telescope | Skywatcher 200PDS (200/1000 Newton) |
| Filter | IDAS D2 (multi-bandpass light pollution filter) |
| Coma corrector | Skywatcher f/5 (0.9x) |
| Field flattener | - |
| Camera | Canon 7D Mark II |
| Resolution | 2643 x 1991 (cropped & scaled) |
| Light frames | 128 (30s @ ISO 1600), 1h4m in total |
| Flat frames | 29 |
| Darkflat frames | - |
| Dark frames | 30 |
| Bias frames | 27 |
| Location | Bolton, UK |
| Local time | 2021-02-11 01:44 - 04:09 |
| Field of View | |
| Image Center |
Due to technical difficulties only 86 subs have the framing we were aiming for. An additinal 42 subs (at right end of graph below) were in focus and well guided, but the framing was not great. These were still blended to help bring down the noise. Timewise these were actually shot mixed in with the correct ones, but it made more sense to process them in this order.
