Southern Cross
1024 x 768 pixels

John Wattie

Using a single, short, unguided 15 second exposure with a Canon 5D, running at ISO 800, through a Sigma 105mm f2.8 macro lens, stopped slightly to f3.5 at a dark sky site (Central Otago) 4:54:02 AM, 05/05/06. Post processing in Photoshop to a 1024 pixel image.

This image shows you are better to use a digital camera for star-gazing than to bother with binoculars, especially as you can study the stars indoors on your computer screen, star chart to hand. Rather than with the discomfort of lying on your back with binoculars, fumbling with a red torch to see the chart. Since the camera was static, the stars have elongated slightly in 15 seconds.

Even with elongation, the major open star clusters are easily made out as hazy patches, similar to how they look in binoculars, but the digital camera shows star colours much better than you can see in binoculars.

 

 

heading
southern cross and pointers
coal sack

The next image is the same, but with main stars and open clusters named.
(Works better on a Macintosh computer running Safari)

Most Star Clusters seen through binoculars are just a hazy spot. Only the bigger versions, such as the famous "Jewell Box", show any stars with binoculars.

Crus Names

Alpha centauri is a double star, but you cannot tell that from this photograph, even from diffraction spikes, since it was unguided. Proxima centauri is the 3rd component of the Alpha system and is a remarkable distance away from the main pair, as shown by Noel Cramer using a 200mm lens here

Kappa Crucis Star cluster (Jewell Box)

from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory's 0.9-meter telescope. (NOAO/AURA/NSF)

NOAO/AURA/NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory's 0.9-meter telescope.

The single red star shows up well in a low power telescope, surrounded by the blue "diamonds" of the other bright stars in the cluster.

Other images:

Clusters:

NGC catalogue

NGC5617 Daniel Verschatse - Santiago de Chile

NGC5138 Map

NGC4852

NGC4337

NGC4349 Good binocular object: as a hazy patch. One Mag 8 star, but the others are 10.5 to 12.5 magnitude stars (about 150 of them).NGC4349 (Digitized Sky Survey, jpg com-pressed)

NGC4349

The Digitized Sky Survey copyright © 1994, Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.

NGC4609 This is a good cluster for binoculars, sitting in the coal sack.

 

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