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Matej Mlakar's picture

Perseid, Pleiades and Mangart

Image from my astro trip to Lago del Predil in Italy. On the road towards Sella Nevea, we get a great view of Mount Mangart and thanks to the PlanitPro I found a great alignment of the mountain and Pleiades star cluster.

Honestly, I kinda hoped to capture something like this. Since I was here one day after the peak, I knew we still should see at least some of the Perseide meteors, but capturing one with a telephoto lens is always extreme luck.

This one was not easy to process. Haze almost made me quit, because I did not get the details out of the landscape shot I wanted, but I used the DBE process in Pixinsight on the landscape layer :D which brought out at least some details.

I am still not quite happy with the image and if we get early snow, I would like to retake it, because a snow-covered mountain and Pleiades in the sky should be a perfect combination.

The Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, Messier 45, and other names by different cultures, is an asterism and an open star cluster containing middle-aged, hot B-type stars in the north-west of the constellation Taurus. At a distance of about 444 light years, it is among the nearest star clusters to Earth. It is the nearest Messier object to Earth, and is the most obvious cluster to the naked eye in the night sky.

EXIF:
H-alpha mod Nikon Z6 & Samyang 135mm
Fornax Lightrack ii tracking mount

Sky: 60 tracked and stacked frames
single frame: ISO 1000, f2, 60sec

Landscape: 5 stacked frames
single frame: ISO 1000, f2, 60sec

I used a blend of stacked/stretched images and a single image, to get a more natural look.

If you want to see some of (pre)processing, you can do that on my instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CwaHWYmorPU/

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