A pair of star clusters around 7500 light-years from Earth, but only a few hundred from each other.
I’ve been imaging a lot of nebulae recently, so decided to mix things up a bit by targeting The Double Cluster, a well-known deep sky object in Perseus. The weather has been pretty iffy, but I managed 15 hours of total integration time.
Processing was fairly straight-forward, certainly simpler than my previous target, The Jellyfish Nebula. I did had to put some effort into bringing out the blue stars, and also controlling the central stars a little so they didn’t blow out the clusters’ cores. It wasn’t too taxing though, and I was lighter on noise reduction than usual due to the lack of faint nebulosity that I’m normally trying to tease out.
I bought my Askar FRA400 telescope and ASI2600-MC PRO camera 14 months ago, and one of my very first imaging targets was The Double Cluster. That old image can be compared with the new one using the slider:
I find it interesting to compare old attempts with new, and it’s good to see how your skills can develop even over a relatively short amount of time. That first version had a total integration time of two hours (this was before I embraced long integration times!) and was processed in Photoshop. Nowadays I mainly use PixInsight, with some Topaz DeNoise AI and Lightroom too.
Maybe I’ll try again next year!
Imaging details
* February 2022
* Bristol, UK (Bortle 8)
* Telescope: Askar FRA400 f/5.6 Quintuplet APO Astrograph
* Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO
* Filter: none
* Mount: Orion Sirius EQ-G
* Guide: William Optics 32mm; ZWO ASI 120MM Mini
* Control: ASIAIR Plus, ZWO EAF
* Software: PixInsight, Lightroom, Topaz DeNoise AI
* 450 x 120 seconds
Total integration time: 15 hours
By Lee Pullen
Example source data
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