A couple of weeks ago I promised to capture some cool images of double stars, open clusters and globular clusters. Unfortunately, my attempts were seriously hampered by ever returning clouds, but last night I finally had a few hours of clear skies. As always when the moon is visible I captured a nice shot of it:

Single exposure of last night’s moon

But by now, we kind of know the moon images right? So I’d like to show you Albireo:

Double star Albireo

Albireo is a double star that consists of Ablireo A (Orange) and Alibreo B (Blue-ish). To the naked eye, Albireo is just a single star, but through a telescope Albireo A and B become distuinguishable.

On my to-shoot-list was also the M81 M82 galaxy pair. But by the time it was dark enough to align and focus on polaris, the galaxies were well behind the chimney. Another thing on my list was trying to manually guide my telescope with the shutter open and that also didn’t go very well.

Another image I promised was a telescopic view of the open cluster M39, which I previously imaged with a 80mm lens. While the image may not be the most exciting astrophoto at first sight, M39 surely is interesting. All the brightest stars in the image are blue. No yellow, orange or red giants, which are more common, but just rarer blue stars.

Telescopic view of open cluster M39

I also shot my first globular cluster through the telescope. This is M13 (Great cluster in Hercules) which I also imaged before:

M13 globular cluster in Hercules

This image is a stack of 30 0.5 second frames and shows a cluster of a large amount of stars. Hundreds more can be seen in longer exposures, which I can’t do since I don’t have a guided mount. The Hercules cluster is the brightest cluster of the northern skies.

At the end of the evening I shot 30 images of the Wild Duck open cluster (Messier 11). It is called the Wild Duck cluster because it somehow resembles a flight of ducks. But to be honest, it doesn’t look like a flight of ducks any more than any other open cluster… Anyway, I like it as the closing picture of this post:

M11 Wild Duck cluster