bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

The Pleiades rose over the house roof and I grabbed it! This is the first time I've actually captured some of the faint reflection nebulosity around the main body of the Pleiades. Kinda happy with the result.

The Mirfak image was supposed to capture Mel-20 but I'm not seeing it. And the last image is simply a random shot of the southern Milky Way.

Shot with a Sony A7R III and Astro-Tech 65EDQ on an iOptron CEM26 mount, no filters, no guiding.

The images display far better when downloaded.

Enjoy!

bwa

Pleiades (M45)(AT65EDQ, 112x30s,ISO6400)_LR_PI_ABE_MStretch_PS(A-P)_LR

(Download)

Mirfak Region (AT65EDQ, 76x30s,ISO6400)_LR_PI_ABE_MStretch_PS(A-P)_LR

(Download)

Milky Way South (AT65EDQ, 69x30s,ISO6400)_LR_PI_ABE_MStretch_PS(A-P)_LR

(Download)

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Nice shots. I really like the color you caught in the Pleiades.

h0grider Loc: Western MD

Looks like a fine capture of Melotte 20 (AKA Collinder 39/40) to me. Consulting my Night Sky Oberver's Guide (Kepple and Sanner), "Melotte 20, the Alpha Persei Moving Group, is the fine field of stars around, and extending SE, from the group's lucida, Alpha Persei [Alfrik]. It includes Psi, 29, 31 and 34, but not sigma Persei." In your image, those stars in the roughly 3 to 6 o'clock quadrants are Melotte 20, including down to the lop-sided trapezius shape (a Corvus lookalike) with the orange yellow star in the right lower corner. Not included in Mel 20 is the wide pair to the 10-11 o'clock position in the image. Overall, Mel 20 has 50 or so bright stars (over 100 members have been ID'd), all having the same proper motion. It lies about 540 LY away and has a diameter of 185' (the Moon is 30' wide). It's a fine binocular object, but your capture "gets it" too!

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

Thanks for the image 'analysis'. I guess I was looking for something smaller and totally missed the forest for the trees! I originally thought Melotte 20 might be the faint emission nebulosity extending out from Mirfak.

I'll get you to identify all the missing objects in my future images

Wanna take a shot at the third image??

bwa

h0grider Loc: Western MD

Thanks, but no thanks, on the image analysis.

I saw that blurry area off Mirfak to the 10-11 o'clock position, and thought if might be the Mel 20 you sought, so I dug out my go-to references to see just what was designated as Mel 20.

I looked at this area on Friday night at a star party in my 15x70s and it's always a nice view, with the "fish hook" shape of the chain of stars around Mirfak always obvious. There are 2 nice compact NGC open clusters in this same area, but they're not in this image.

How far "south" is that 3rd image? I can see down to about -40 deg. declination from my location (if you like looking through "soup"), but if the photo was taken from your northern location, that would limit what could be seen by a lot!

h0grider Loc: Western MD

I see a pretty obvious Barnard(?) dark nebula near the lower bright star, but I don't recognize the star field (I can star hop pretty good, but don't often recognize a star field just by looking at it).

Does that nebula have a designation?

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

After checking some of my other images I'm beginning to believe that 'dark nebula' is a smudge on my camera sensor!? I'll call it the Smudge Nebula .

I shot the star field to check whether the scope was giving good stars to the edge of the image; appears it is. As for the area, it was about 45 deg. up the Milky Way...

bwa