This image was taken with the moon 90% full, but it was the first clear night for me in about six weeks. It was time for a photon fix!NGC 6791 is a curious open cluster of stars in the constellation Lyra. It contains as many as 10,000 stars. (Obviously, only the brightest are visible in this image, taken with the moon almost full from a light-polluted suburb.) This cluster is also one of the oldest open clusters known, estimated at about 8 billion years. What is doubly curious about this cluster is that another group of stars in the cluster appears to be about 6 billion years old. That's odd because most stars in open clusters form at the same time, so they should all be roughly the same age. The 6 billion year old stars are all white dwarfs, and none of them are bright enough to show up in this photo. You are seeing only the 8 billion-year-old cluster stars here. Source. NGC 6791 lies about 13,000 light years away.
This image is 30x4' with the SXVF-H9C through the 6" Orion I-Newt.
No comments:
Post a Comment