The astrophotographers curse! Purchase new gear and the weather goes south! With only a few hours here and there coinciding with a full moons over the last 5 weeks, the natural thing to do is image an interesting cluster.
Covering half a degree across the sky with 40-50 stars associated to the cluster, M39 is located in the constellation Cygnus at a distance of around 1000 lys away. The Gaia Satellite has been measuring the proper motion of biliions of stars including those of M39, and interestingly it is now known that there were 350 stars that were part of this cluster covering over 20 degrees of the sky! Most of these stars are beyond its tidal radius so therefore are not bound to the cluster now. Along with the use of Parallax data from Gaia it was also confirmed that these further 350 were members using the colour magnitude diagram, all lying perfectly on the colour magnitude diagram, the beauty of tech and science!
I must say my new EQ6R Pro is performing really well, guiding @ 0.3 - 0.5 arcsecs using a 60x240 guide scope and a guide cam with 3.75 micron pixels. Well within the pixel scale of my scope and camera. Very nice
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