NGC 362

On the evening of August 8 2017 I captured a few photons from NGC 362 and it's surroundings.

As it's located right on the border of the Small Magellanic cloud(SMC) I have also picked up a few nebula in the image.
These belong to the SMC. The two brighter nebula in the image are NGC 346 and NGC 371.

The Globular cluster NGC 362 is in our galaxy and the nebula are all in the SMC, bend your mind around that for a bit.

The image consists of the following:

100 X 20 second light frames.
114 X 20 second dark frames.
50 X flat frames.
ISO 1600
Canon 1200D
Skywatcher 102.

Just to remind you that this is all short exposure astrophotography on a alt/az goto mount.
This generally limits our exposures to 30 seconds or less.
We then gather as many of these exposures(light frames) as we can and then stack them later.
In this case the target is very close to the SCP(South celestial pole) and so field rotation on the alt/az mount becomes a problem so I gather fewer subs than I would have liked.
None the less the image looks OK to me.
The dark frames help with toning down the noise and the flat frames help reduce any vignetting and those pesky dust bunnies that sit on the camera's sensor.
Sounds like plenty of work but it is all good clean fun and I cannot complain, seeing a good result for your effort makes it all worthwhile for me.


So here is a screen shot from a planetarium simulation program(K-Stars) that indicates where in the sky it was when I took aim at it.

And then the image itself, NGC 362 is upper left, check out the annotated image below that for more info on the other clusters and nebula in the image.

Annotated.

Here is the brief run down on what each object in the annotation is.

NGC 362- Globular cluster.
NGC 361- Open star cluster.
NGC 299-Open  star cluster.
NGC 306-Open star cluster.
NGC 330-Open star cluster.
NGC 345-Open star cluster with associated nebula.
IC 1611-Open star cluster in Tucana.
IC 1612-Open star cluster in Tucana.
NGC 371 open star cluster with associated nebula.
NGC 395-Open star cluster in Tucana.
IC 1624-Open cluster in Tucana.
IC 411-open cluster Tucana.
IC 1655-Open cluster.

Thanks for taking a look.

clear skies!