The Spider and the Fly

The Fly and Spider nebulae are in the northern constellation Auriga.   At about magnitude 10 they cannot be seen by naked eye.

The Spider and Fly Nebulae

AKA NGC 1931 (The Fly), to the left of the frame, and IC 417.  The more compact NGC 1931 is about 10 light-years across. About 10,000 light-years distant, both are known as young open star clusters.

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).

Six 240-second sub-frames were used and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker = 24 minute photo. Unguided, unbinned, no darks or flats. Processed in Photoshop (CS5).

Location in the night sky of the photo:

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