It’s hard to believe that this is the first image from the California telescope in four months. The weather there has been so bad that the team was beginning to wonder if we would ever get to image in 2023. However, we finally got a couple of good nights though they were, of course, near the full moon. So we opted for M37, an open cluster in Auriga.

Open clusters are typically full of young stars and the age of this cluster is estimated at 350-550 million years making the stars they’re relatively young (as stars go). The cluster consists of about 500 stars and is a bit further out from the center of the galaxy than we are on the same spiral arm we are in. It’s about 4,500 light years away.

This was a fairly short integration compared to what we typically do on that telescope but star clusters don’t take much time when there isn’t any faint nebulosity to worry about. For al the technical details, see astrobin.