Last night, while waiting for Comet 2022 E3 ZTF to emerge from behind the trees, I decided to photograph M67 – an open cluster in the constellation Cancer. I haven’t photographed this object before. It’s a cluster of some 500 stars located about 2600 Light Years from Earth.
Open clusters are formed in clouds of gas and dust like the Rosette Nebula and other stellar nurseries that are found in the arms of our galaxy. This particular cluster has some stars with Jupiter-sized planets in orbit around them. The image below is a cropped version of a wider field. It is the composite of 60, 30sec exposures taken at ISO1600 using my backyard observatory Stellarvue 130mm f/5 APO astrograph.
