Little Beehive Cluster (M41) or Beehive Cluster (M44)?

[RickBG]

As of May 11, after reading Tim's comment posted below, I realized that my telescope was pointing at M41 called the "Little Beehive Cluster" not M44 called the "Beehive cluster". My take away from it...there are two kinds of Beehive clusters. Maybe next year I will aim my telescope at M44, but for now it is too high and out of reach.

This photo was taken on 3/18/21 on my high-rise balcony with Bortle of 8-9 without guiding.
Hardware: CPC 800 SCT/ZWO ASI183 MC Pro/Optolong L-Pro filter/HyperStar 1.9 reducer
Software: SharpCap Pro 4 beta version and processed with PhotoShop 2021.
a. Bahtinov mask for focusing
b. Raw 16
c. Capture Area: 5496x3672
d. Frames: 519
e. Exposure: 3.6 sec (based on the "Brain")
f. Gain: 0 (based on the "Brain")
g. Dithered (no darks, bias, and flat frames were used)

Rick

[timh]

Hi Rick,

The field is nice in that you seem to have got the whole cluster in (I have too long focus for that) and the brighter stars not too bloated.

However the color seems weaker than I am used to seeing for this cluster ? It normally shows obvious yellow and blue stars. Maybe it is to do with your bright sky background making it more difficult to process - I normally add intensity back after stretching using Curves? I just wondered whether, as well as being bright, your Miami background skies tend to be a bit misty or have poor transparency sometimes? I ask this because of a discussion thread with Oopfan in Tips and Tricks within which I carried out a couple of careful experiments to explore how the SNR of stacks in the three colour channels might vary with the length of subframe exposures viewtopic.php?p=20757#p20757. Not a definite conclusion but just a suggestion from those experiments that - only if the transparency is poor - the final SNR and color of stacks might be improved by using subframes that are longer than suggested by BRAIN? However increasing the exposure is a poor suggestion if you are already running out of dynamic range which you may be and may relate to your sky brightness?

Tim

[RickBG]

Hi Tim,

Please read the intro of my post above which perhaps clarifies the discrepancy concerning colors. M41 is very different than M44 even though they share the same name "Beehive". The five stars that form a pentagon are yellow stars with no blue but you would be correct if it had been M44.

Rick

[timh]

Thanks for the explanation Rick ... oK so that is why I didn't recognize anything from any angle ! M41 is something I have never looked at before.

just for the record here is the core of M44 - about 20min of 20s subframes using an ASI294PRO and 8" Newtonian and flattener at F 4.5. A rather spread out target for my long focus so I can't capture it all but an attractive sight nevertheless.

Tim