There’s been a very long streak of cloudy nights, and I hear that that’s the standard fee any astrophotographer needs to pay after any purchase relative to astrophotography. Fair enough. Given that, as mentioned before, I haven’t modified my Canon 450D so to remove the IR-Cut filter, for the time being I will be shooting solely objects which don’t have particularly noticeable emissions in the infrared. This short blog post is to remind myself of the next target: M39.
This beautiful image is also my quality target, of course, although I think it was taken with a telescope with a diameter of 0.9m…
M39, also known as NGC7092, is a young open cluster of stars some 800 light years away. Mostly comprised by warm blue stars, it should be aged from 230 to 300 million years. Thirty stars are proven to belong to the cluster, all inside an imaginary sphere with a diameter of seven light years. These thirty warm young stars shine with the brightness of 830 of our Suns.
M39 is also moving towards us at the speed of 28km/s. I sincerely hope I’ll manage to image it before it hits us in approximately 8.5 million years! (Just kidding: it won’t probably hit us.)