NGC 7789 was discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1783 and is known as Caroline’s Rose in her honor. Her brother William Herschel included it in his catalog as H VI.30. 

This image was compiled from 54 frames at 120 seconds each. Perhaps should have gone with longer exposures but was concerned of overloading the starfield.

“Caroline’s Rose is an example of an open star cluster. Unlike globular clusters, which are ancient objects, open star clusters are groups of up to a few thousand younger stars that are loosely bound together by gravity. Caroline’s Rose is about 8,000 lightyears away and is a much older open star cluster, potentially about 1.6 billion years old.”

“The brightest stars in the cluster are orange giants. Most other bright members are also evolved stars – giants and subgiants. More than a dozen blue stragglers have been identified in the cluster. These are stars that appear younger and bluer than expected for their evolutionary stage. They are hotter than main sequence stars in the cluster that are about to evolve into red giants. Blue stragglers are believed to be the result of stars colliding and producing higher-mass stars with higher temperatures.”

Had a nice night with a waxing quarter moon in the sky but otherwise good seeing conditions. Was annoyed at the ever increasing satellites making streaks on the early subs but not so much after midnight. Set up with 120 second subs and this the result of 1 hour and 20 minutes stacked.

“The Gumball Globular contains about 200,000 stars. In 2006, M12 was discovered to contain a surprisingly low number of low mass stars. Scientists believe that these stars were stripped from M12 by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way Galaxy and that the cluster lost four times as many members as it still has over its lifetime. In other words, as the cluster’s orbit took it through the denser regions of the Milky Way plane, M12 ejected about a million stars into the galaxy’s halo. This explains why there are hardly any M-class (red) dwarfs in the cluster. It will take another 4.5 billion years before M12 dissociates completely.”

A “new” hand me down computer is now at the telescope and last night was the first shakedown for all of the newly installed software. The hardware remains the same for now but over time the software exceeded what the old computer could handle. But that also means setting up each piece of software as a new configuration.

ASCOM interface platform, Stellarium planetarium, SharpCap polar align and reference star align, PHD2 star guiding, EQMOD mount control, Astro Photography Tool, ASI camera drivers, and so on need to be running correctly to take in image. I had most of these loaded already but the telescope and cameras need to be connected with a stary night to get everything sorted.

The moon is around half full and the skies were not very clear so I chose to do some quick 30 second, iso 800 exposures of the Great Globular Cluster as a bright target in the darkest corner of my view. This image is only 20 some sub exposures but gets everything verified in good working order. Not nearly as nice as the last one posted two years ago but this was just a practice run!