NGC 3532 'Wishing Well' Cluster (Barry Brook)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Carina (Car) · Contains: NGC 3532

NGC 3532 'Wishing Well' Cluster

Also known as the 'Black Arrow', this spectacular open cluster in Carina covers an area of about 60' x 30', and sparkles with over 100 blue and yellow stars of even brightness. They look somewhat like a collection of coins shimmering at the bottom of a wishing well. This cluster is clearly apparent as a dense aggregation of stars to the naked eye, just below the Eta Carina nebula, but it is rarely imaged. It lies about 1600 light years away, and is only 200-350 million years old.

This is my first serious image with my new QHY22 monochrome camera. It is beautifully sensitive and clean, especially in the Hydrogen Alpha wavelength. This image is composed of the following:

12 x Red at 305 sec

12 x Green at 303 sec

12 x Blue at 328 sec

7 x Ha at 1200 sec

Total integration is a little over 5 hours. There was no need for a separate luminance channel given the cluster's brightness, and the RGB channel durations are based on G2V calibration. In post-processing, the colours were perfect.

Captured in APT, calibrated in Nebulosity, stacked in DSS and post-processed in StarTools. I created a synthetic HaRGB luminance and used RGB only for the colour.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

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This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
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Star trails
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Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
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Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	593598
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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NGC 3532 'Wishing Well' Cluster

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