M29 an Open Cluster in Cygnus. The "H" in the sky. (RonAdams)

M29 an Open Cluster in Cygnus. The "H" in the sky.

Another clear night. I knew what I wanted to image before I went outside. I've been wanting

to image M29 and M39 in Cygnus to add to my Messier project. I chose to image M29 first.

I pointed my scope to where it should be and I only had to search a minute or two before

locating it. However it did not look like what I expected. I thought it would be six or seven

nicely resolved stars in a group. However that is not what it looked like in my AT72ED Refractor.

Stars were not resolved and the object appeared to be a hazy smudge of light not unlike a

lot of the faint fuzzies that are not open clusters that I've viewed. I can understand why

Messier listed it in his catalog if it looked in his scope as it appeared in my 72mm refractor.

This is one of the toughest images I've ever processed. There is a tremendous amount of red

nebulosity in this part of the sky and there is a very dense star field also. I wasn't aware of

that because I've not imaged this object before. When I would stretch the data to try and

bring out the red nebulosity it would wreck the very dense star field. If I would concentrate

just on the stars then not much nebulosity would be brought out. I created a star mask which

is what needed to be done in this situation but after trying several times without achieving

what I wanted I decided to go another route. It was 4 am and I was tired so I decided I

would work on it again after I had some sleep. I reprocessed the image this morning and

I attempted to get a happy medium where my star field was not muddled yet I still had a little

nebulosity in the image. That is what you see here. This will be an image that I definitely

will reprocess once I've had a break from it. With all of that said please enjoy my first image

of M29.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: I was looking through some of my image folders today and I decided to reprocess this image. I like this better than the original image.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Basic failed
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Astrometry.net job	2431127
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