The Butterfly Cluster
07-Jul-2019
The Butterfly Cluster, Messier 6, is an open cluster of hot blue stars with the brightest member being an orange giant star. Behind the cluster is the orange light of the Milky Way, and a beautiful cloud of excited Hydrogen alpha gas.
Image:
- 38x 180s Red
- 35x 180s Green
- 33x 180s Blue
- 31x 300s 6nm Hα
Total integration 7 hours, 53 minutes.
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond 80ED
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik 6nm Hα, deep sky RGB filters
- Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
- Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
- Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II
Location:
- Imaged on 2 nights: 31st May and 4th June 2019.
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
- Captured with TheSkyX Professional
- Guiding with PHD2
- FocusLock live focusing
- PixInsight: Calibrate, align, stack, deconvolution, NBCombinator, histogram stretch, curves.