• 

The Perseus Double Cluster is one of the most popular places to point a telescope for visual observers in the northern hemisphere. The sight of the two clusters in a single field of view is spectacular and I’ve never seen an image that does it justice. This is true for me in general on star clusters. They tend to look better visually than photographically where nebulae and galaxies are always more detailed photographically.

My goal for the image was to capture, as much as I could, the feeling of the eyepiece view. As a result, I kept the total integration time short, quite short, at 23 minutes. The processing is also very simple at just DBE, PCC, HT, Curves for saturation and SCNR to remove some green.

The data was taken early before sunrise on September 2018 though I didn’t get a chance to process it until January. I wasn’t sure I’d even like it enough to post though I decided in the end I did.

You can find the image at astrobin.