M39 open cluster in Cygnus – second light

Well I did manage to get out on the evening of the 20th, even though it was work the next day, and I spent a couple of hours imaging the beautiful open cluster M39 in Cygnus.

The Starizona automatic focusing routine for the FeatherTouch worked perfectly and I got great focus [FWHM 1.3] before the imaging session.  Managed to get 53 subs in the end [one sub deleted due to a plane on its way to Bournemouth airport] using 2-minute subs.  Not so much of a pain losing subs again when they’re only a couple of minutes long 🙂

Got the data over to Noel as quickly as possible and he worked his magic.  Not an easy one to process as we had an almost full Moon trundling along low in the south all the time I was imaging, but Noel did a great job in flattening the image even with all the (natural) light pollution.

 M39 as you can see sits in the Milky Way and this image very nicely shows some dark rifts running through the region.  Also look out for the planetary nebula towards the top/left of the image.

 I am extremely pleased with this result, especially as it took less than 2-hours to get all the data!!  Imagine the Hyperstar doing its thing on a clear winter’s evening – I could potentially get 3 or even 4 good images from this system in a single evening – bliss!!!!  I am beginning to think that the mini-WASP array might not even make it to first light at this rate.

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2 Responses to M39 open cluster in Cygnus – second light

  1. SteveL says:

    And I thought you said you were just too tired to go all the way down the garden and image 😉

  2. Greg Parker says:

    That was the day after 🙂 I was pretty shattered at work all day on Monday though and won’t be doing that again for quite a while.
    Greg

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