The night of 1/22, I set the 5″ astrograph to take pictures of comet C/2022 E3 ZTF. Unfortunately, the comet’s position in the sky put it behind trees. The night was so clear and moonless that I felt I had to take a picture of something! After looking at an online astrophotography planning site, I settled on this globular cluster. It is a very large cluster that can be found in the constellation Lynx. At 300K light years from Earth, it is thought to be a remnant of a small galaxy caught by the Milky Way. At that distance from us, it appears faint in a modest instrument like my backyard astrograph.
The image below is the composite of 19, 240-second exposures taken at ISO1600. The first image is a highly cropped version that shows NGC2419 as a diffuse fuzzball. The second image is a wider field of view but still much smaller than the actual DSLR’s full-frame.
An image of NGC1419 taken with a much larger instrument appears here. You have to admit it’s pretty.