Wishing Well Cluster
16-Jun-2022
First Calalogued in 1752, the NGC 3532, also known as the Wishing Well Cluster is an open cluster comprised of approximately 150 stars. It was also the first object ever observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The bright orange star in the top right of the image is x Carinae (x Car), the brightest yellow hypergiant in the sky - 200,000 times as luminous as the Sun.
Image:
- 56x 180s Luminance
- 53x 180s Red
- 51x 180s Green
- 45x 180s Blue
- 41x 240s 6nm H-α
Total integration 13 hours. Focal length: 520mm
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond 80ED with 0.85x reducer
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astrodon RGB Gen2 E-Series Tru-Balance filters
- Astronomik Luminance and 6nm H-α filters
- Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
- Innovations Foresight ONAG
- Starlight Instruments Feather Touch Focuser
Location:
- Exposed over 4 nights between 12th February to 14th March 2021
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
- Captured with TheSkyX Professional
- Guiding with PHD2
- PixInsight: Calibrate, align, integrate, dymanic background extraction, LRGB combination, noise reduction, photometric color calibration, pixelmath add H-α to luminance and red channels, HDR multiscale transform, histogram, curves, crop.