Overview
A pair of star clusters around 7500 light-years from Earth, but only a few hundred from each other.
Background
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.
Imaging details
| Date | February 2022 |
| Location | Bristol, UK (Bortle 8) |
| Telescope | Askar FRA400 f/5.6 Quintuplet APO Astrograph |
| Camera | ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO |
| Mount | Orion Sirius EQ-G |
| Guide | William Optics 32mm; ZWO ASI 120MM Mini |
| Control | ASIAIR Plus |
| Software | PixInsight, Lightroom |
| Filters | No filter: 840 x 120 seconds |
| Total exposure time | 15 hours |
| Image credit | Lee Pullen |
Processing
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!
Seestar S50
Here’s an image of the Double Cluster taken using a Seestar S50 from my city centre location.
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