M44, the Beehive – Open Cluster in Cancer

The Beehive Cluster – M44 in Cancer. 59×5 sec, Orion Ultra-Mini 30mm F/4.3 guidescope, Toupcam AR130 Color guide camera.

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to try.  I used my new guidescope and color guide camera combo to take images of the Beehive in Cancer.   It looked great on the screen with 5 second exposures.

I used the ToupSky capture software, which shoots continuous frames and saves each frame in an AVI movie file.    Then, I imported the AVI file into IRIS and treated the data like I was processing a planetary image.   It worked great and it was fast to process, too.

Color balance could be better, but I think I can fix that before I start recording by tweaking the settings in the ToupSky software.  Now that I know it can be done, I’ll probably try this again the next time the weather is clear.

For fun, I combined the above image with one taken with my TV-85 back in 2015.  Check it out:

TV-85 data combined with the Ultra-Mini Guidescope/Toupcam combo.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

four × 4 =