In a recently rare clear night, Ivan Walton (CADSAS Astrophotography Director) captured this image of the constellation of Perseus, nearly overhead on the evening of 1st January 2013.
20 RAW frames, each of 10secs. were taken at 800ASA using a Nikon D40 dSLR with a fixed 50mm f1.8 lens.
The frames were then stacked in Deep Sky Stacker software & adjusted in Adobe Photoshop to produce this splendid view of one of the beautiful winter constellations.
Two objects have been identified.
- Algol (Beta Persei) is the best known eclipsing binary star, ranging from magnitude 2.12 to 3.40 over a period of 2.8673 days!
- M34 (NGC 1039) is a fine open cluster, which can just be glimpsed with the naked eye.
