Sunday, March 13, 2016 M44, a.k.a. the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe (Kurt Zeppetello)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cancer (Cnc) · Contains: 38 Cnc · 39 Cnc · 40 Cnc · 41 eps Cnc · 42 Cnc · Beehive cluster · IC 2388 · IC 2390 · M 44 · NGC 2624 · NGC 2625 · NGC 2632 · NGC 2637 · NGC 2643 · Praesepe

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Sunday, March 13, 2016 M44, a.k.a. the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe

Link: http://kurt-zeppetello.blogspot.com/2016/03/m44-aka-beehive-cluster-or-praesepe.html

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Sunday, March 13, 2016 M44, a.k.a. the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe

Link: http://kurt-zeppetello.blogspot.com/2016/03/m44-aka-beehive-cluster-or-praesepe.html

I must admit, this cluster does not look much like a beehive to me, but it is pleasant to look at especially with binoculars. It is an open cluster approximately 577 ly in the constellation Cancer and is visible to the naked eye in dark locations. This represents the 22nd Messier object on my quest to image all 110 Messier Objects with the Orion ED80. I was finally able to get PHD2 autoguiding to work by changing some of the settings such as the pixel size to match my QHY-5L-II-M guide camera. I went through a tutorial PHD Basics Part #1 by Matthew Dixon on You Tube to get the settings which work for my setup. I highly recommend this video for getting started with PHD2 autoguiding! As a side note, I would have been able to get more images but the dithering function was on in PHD2. I have never used dithering before and am sure what it does exactly so I will try to turn it of next time as it adds time between imaging. Also, I learned that the Sirius EQ Mount tracks at least a half hour after crossing the meridian and on that same note, when it does the meridian flip, the camera must be rotated 180 degrees in order to keep the image in the same orientation as it was prior to the flip.

Addendum:

This is an addendum to my original M44 post back in March. The stars appeared to have a greenish tint so I reprocessed the images adding the StarTools color module to reset the stars to a more natural color since stars really aren't green (or at least we can't see as it would be masked).

Original
B
Final
C

Imaged with APT
N.I.N.A. Users

All - Most Recent First
Open Clusters

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1307232
PixInsight job	O425GP7PUW4TXM023N5SQKD6KNS3TDQM
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	08h40m07s.22
RA (top/left)	08h42m39s.27
RA (top/right)	08h37m34s.66
RA (bottom/right)	08h37m36s.30
RA (bottom/left)	08h42m38s.90

Dec (center)	+19°41′56″.3
Dec (top/left)	+20°09′46″.0
Dec (top/right)	+20°09′39″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	+19°13′57″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	+19°14′05″.6

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Sunday, March 13, 2016 M44, a.k.a. the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe

Sunday, March 13, 2016 M44, a.k.a. the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe

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Sunday, March 13, 2016 M44, a.k.a. the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe

Sunday, March 13, 2016 M44, a.k.a. the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe

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