Wednesday 6 November 2013

There are some 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. A good chunk of them are in this shot. Shall we count them?




Make sure you click on this photo to embiggen it!

Messier 7—or M7 or NGC 6475 or even the Ptolemy Cluster—is an open cluster of about 80 stars right near the 'stinger' of the Scorpio constellation. And as you can clearly see, that also lines up with some of the densest part of the central Milky Way!

Peter Treyde of Queanbeyan explains his overwhelming photo:

While I was running around doing the frog census, and taking happy snaps of the stars over the pond, I set up my telescope to capture some of the photons raining down from M7 (NGC6475). It's much closer to home only about 980 light years distant!
The seeing was not bad that night. I originally intended to get about 3hrs of data but decided enough was enough after 90 mins.A lot of people seem to process the hot bright stars blue. I have not tweaked the colour.
The details:
OS RC360/Paramount/FLI16803/FLI RGB filters.
1xR, 1xG, 1xB sub 30 min each (-30C).
Guided and way oversampled.
Processed in PixInsight.
Batch Pre-process, Cosmetic Correction, Dynamic Crop applied, Dynamic Background Extraction, Channel Combination, Colour Calibration, and just a touch of deconvolution.

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