Anywhere Is: Hyades, also featuring NGC 1647, open cluster

The sisters-in-law of Pleiades by myth, the relatives of the Beehive cluster in terms of stellar genesis. The closest open cluster and the core of constellation Taurus.

 

Kind of fanatic experiment - wide-field deepsky imaging from the middle of 15 000 000 people city. UHC-S filter is good, but not that good :(

 

Aquisition time: 7.10.2013 between 01:00 and 02:00 MSK (UTC+4)

Equipment:

Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 macro USM lens and Baader Planetarium 2" UHC filter mounted in front of the lens via step-down ring attached to Canon EOS 60D running Magic Lantern 2.3 firmware override riding on Vixen Polarie tracking platform over photo-tripod (alltogether codenamed "Anywhere Is, SWANS configuration").

Aperture 21,4 mm

Focal length 60 mm

Tv = 30 seconds (I have aligned Polarie blindly - by latitude value and compass.)

Av = f/2.8

ISO 1600

Exposures: 12 (not enough) (plus 5 dark frames (badly not enough) and 5 offset frames plus 3 fake flat-field frames).

Processing: Images were converted to 16-bit TIFFs in Canon DPP and outputs were fed to DSS.

16-bit stacking result was processed in Photoshop.

 

Note: greed is bad. Instead of shooting Pleiades and rising Orion I should have concentrated on this target. And now I have three bad datasets instead of one mediocre :(

 

Done