Spiral Cluster/M34

Messier 34 (also known as M34 or NGC 1039), the Spiral Cluster is in the constellation Perseus. The cluster is just visible to the naked eye in very dark conditions. Since the Moon was waxing gibbous at 69% on November 21, I used a hydrogen filter to filter out the moonlight. The filter also makes the stars look smaller.

In Perseus

North (toward Polaris) is up in the photo. The picture was taken with a fully modified Canon Rebel camera (this is my one shot color camera) on a TEC 140 telescope in the Alpenglow-Torrey House Observatory in the dark sky community of Torrey, Utah (Bortle 2-3).

I lost my remote connection but my wife Kirsten via April the housekeeper fixed it.

The 12 best of 14 120-second sub-frames were used and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker = 24 minute photo. Unguided, binned 2X2 in the SkyX (to make smaller files for internet transfer), no calibration frames. Processed in Photoshop (CS5).

Location in the night sky of the photo:

Source: Astrometry.net

Leave a Reply