A handful of Herschel 400 open clusters

Tuesday night proved to be clear yet again (that's 3 clear nights in less than a week, which must be a record for this year). But the transparency was dreadful so I decided to knock off a few Herschel open clusters rather than bang my head against the wall on dim galaxies and/or planetaries.

NGC7510 12/02/2008 22:30UT; Pickering 5, NELM 5, SQM 20.4
16" Mak-Cass, AP1200GTO

An interesting spray of stars in 3 or 4 lines from a single point. Looks very much like a firework going off. 7 brighter members and perhaps 15 dimmer ones.

NGC7160 12/02/2008 22:50UT; Pickering 5, NELM 5, SQM 20.4
16" Mak-Cass, AP1200GTO

A bit similar to a mini-Pleiades; 7 bright stars in a distorted dipper shape with an arc of 5 dimmer stars connecting the bucket to the handle. Very bright field star above bucket (to NE).

NGC7142 12/02/2008 23:00UT; Pickering 5, NELM 5, SQM 20.4
16" Mak-Cass, AP1200GTO

Considerably dimmer than NGC7160 or 7510, and much more numerous. Perhaps 50 direct vision members and a further 20 - 40 averted.

NGC7510 12/02/2008 23:10UT; Pickering 5, NELM 5, SQM 20.4
16" Mak-Cass, AP1200GTO

Huge, bountiful cluster somewhat cramped even in 31T5+TC. Hundreds of stars -- definitely one of the better H400 open clusters.

4" APO, AP1200GTO

Quite striking in the Tak, where the central cluster star count drops to about 40, but another outer ring appears with a minima of background stars between it and the central cluster. Outer ring a bit over 1° in diameter.

Cheers,
-- Jeff.

Looking good Jeff. Are they on spiral bound A4 book? If so that would make the sketches pretty big! I find that sketching on very large canvases sometimes tricky. Persoannly, I'm an A5 kind of guy when at the eyepiece...

By the way, your scans show some clouded artefacts through the page, just to let you know. May need to add a weight to your scanner cover to keep the page as flat as possible.

Seanie.

Seanie --

I agree: A5 is the way to go. My local art & hobby used to carry A5 spiral bound books (with nice heavy paper), but they don't anymore. I now order them from ecreations.co.uk:

Product ID 5011385942989 Spiral Sketchbook, Portrait, A5. White cartridge paper, 50 sheets of 160gm, acid free.

-- Jeff.

Oh... the one downside to the spiral bound books is that they're harder to hold flat on the scanner. As you noticed I get scanning artefacts on them (which I sometimes clean up better than other times).

I almost never get them on my solar sketches (which I do on tear-out 9" x 12" Strathmore Artagain pads).

Still like the spiral bound books for deep sky, though....

Cheers,
-- Jeff.