Yet another unexpected clear evening – these weather forecasters need to get their act together. I’m not complaining about the clear sky though as it meant more tests. Here’s the open cluster Messier 35.
It’s accompanied by a fainter and older open cluster, NGC 2158, which is further away. It’s perhaps not obvious in the header image, so I have outlined it here:
Technical details: cropped from a bigger image taken with the 200mm setting on my 55-200mm zoom, at f/5.6. A stack of 20s exposures at ISO 3200. Total exposure time 380 seconds. The focus is not quite as good as the sharpest 5 images, but the bigger stack seems to win out in terms of the viewable image. I used the DeepSkyStacker software on Windows for this; it seems to work pretty well usually, though I have tried other packages as well.