20th February 2017 presented a good opportunity to test out the GStar-Ex3 camera on open clusters. Hitherto the emphasis had been on diffuse nebulae and similar extended deep sky objects requiring longer rather than shorter exposures. But star clusters should need exposures of only a few seconds and it would be interesting to see what the camera would produce. Ten clusters were imaged all pretty much in the same part of the sky. The maps below show where they are in relation to the Sun, all being in our local arm of the Milky Way galaxy save that M67 is well above the galaxy's plane. Click them to enlarge. As can be seen they are concentrated towards the constellations of Monoceros, Canis Major and Puppis. They differ widely in distance ranging from the nearby NGC 2516 (1,300 light years) to the distant NGC 2360 (6,150 light years).
The images below were captured using ToupSky's average-mode live stack and dark frame subtraction features. All exposures were of 5 seconds at gamma 53 using the binned resolution of 1520 x 1024 pixels. This produced a display of stars down to magnitude 15.3. The number of stacked exposures used for each image is noted in its caption. The images are arranged in order of distance. Click on each image to get a larger view.
