Messier 46 is an open cluster in Puppis constellation. It is pretty low above horizon at my location, so I needed to wait for convenient moment to catch it. This moment has come at the end of March this year – transparency was pretty good, but it is usually correlated with poor seeing. And it was also the case – star diameter was 3.5 arc sec and no less 🙁 Messier 46 cluster is placed about 5500 light years away, and there is NGC2438 small planetary nebula visible in the cluster. But in three dimensional world this nebula is somewhere in the half of the way to M46 open cluster. If you will take a closer look to this frame you will also spot small reddish bubble in the middle top part – this is another planetary nebula – PK 231 +04 1.
This image is also first official cooperation between QHY163M mono and QHY163C color cameras. Subframes were collected with 130mm refractor on EQ6 mount. These are 35×3 minutes of mono frames and 20×3 minutes of color frames, then stacked all together in a proper way. Image is maybe not quite well framed, but I wanted both nebulae to be in the picture 🙂
Large version here https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-03-28-M46-2.jpg
Clear skies!
