The M11-Scutum Star Cloud is a beautiful region rich in dark nebulae and an unbelievable density of stars. It is a relatively unobstructed look through the depths of our galaxy from our perspective. It's hard to imagine how many stars are visible, perhaps a half million or more in this image. Equally difficult to envision is that this is how the entire galaxy would look, were it not for the thick clouds of dust that shroud most of it from our view.

This 58 megapixel image encompasses a 4.7x4.1 degree area. M11 and several open clusters from the NGC and IC are sprinkled about the frame, and a score or more Barnard dark nebulae frame the cloud. It is these dust clouds that block the light from the same density of stars behind them that makes this appear to be a cloud of stars.

This is a six panel mosaic made using the Takahashi CCA250. It is six panels because I screwed up the overlap between the left side and right side panels, leaving a gap of a couple hundred pixels. The fill frames actually turned out better than the side frames, so I just used the extra from the side frames. This makes the aspect ratio a little rectangular, but it also allowed me to encompass a bit more of the nebulosity on the left edge.

The panels were taken on four different nights, which resulted in strong color balance differences between the frames. It took a bit of work to get their color to balance. I processed this image data for around 20 hours, all told. I think I'll investigate some tooling to make this a bit easier, like Registar and Excalibrator.

As you can tell from the number of revisions, I've struggled mightily with the color balance of this image. I even solicited the advice of my friend, Giuseppe Donatiello, and I hope I've managed to show my heed to his advice. This exercise has also taught me about how differently monitors render colors, particularly yellows and dark reds. The same image looks quite different between my Windows monitor and my Macbook retina display. I've rendered this so it pleases me on the Mac.

Image acquired at Prairie Sky Observatory, a facility of Twin City Amateur Astronomers (tcaa.us).