In the constellation Vela in Southern Skies is a large open cluster that’s visible to the naked eye. Comprising about 30 stars spread over a 50 arc minute area, it lies at a mean distance of about 580 light years. The individual stars were formed around 36 million years ago.
The individual sub-frames are all of 3 minutes (2x luminance, 1x red, 1x green, 2x blue). To try and get the star colours correct I used a simple utility called eXcalibrator from http://bf-astro.com/index.htm. This uses catalog information from NOMAD to calculate scaling values for the RGB channels. In this case, adjustments were minor (R – 1.0, G – 0.97, B – 1.22). The telescope used was GRAS-10, a TEC-140 refractor.
Since originally posting this image I’ve purchased a copy of Carboni’s Astronomy Tools and added some diffraction spikes to the brightest stars.
