I planned to picture Collinder 399 (nickname Coathanger, or Brocchi’s Cluster) for a pretty long time, but my “large” imaging setups had too small field of view. This time I used 135mm telephoto lens that grabbed easily both Coathanger asterism and lot of dark nebulosity in the same time – frame below contains western part of Vulpecula (Little Fox) constellation. Coathanger asterism is placed in the frame bottom – straight line of six stars plus four stars “hook”. It can be spotted with naked eye under dark sky, but it is more like binocular object. All these stars are apparently close to each other, but in three dimensional world they are much more distributed, closest star is 270 light years away, and the most distant is over 2000 light years away.
Large version here https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/2017-08-17-Cr399-fin.jpg
There are also pretty lot of dark nebulae in the frame, although none of them has been catalogued by Barnard. Each larger dark cloud contains several LDN catalog items. Large dark “diplodocus” above the Coathanger contains vdB126 nebula in the middle. There are also a few small open clusters – usual guests at star rich fields.
Image is LRGB stack 60:24:24:24 minutes made with QHY163M camera and Samyang 135/2 lens on Smart EQ Pro mount. Location: Anticiana, Toscana.
Clear skies!
The amazing sky form my village (and my house). I’m proud of this.
Hi Giacomo 🙂 That is correct – thanks for this nice holidays. And there will be more pictures soon 🙂