M46 & M47 Open Star Clusters

Here is a 1 hour exposure of the M46 and M47 Open Clusters. M47 is on the top, and M46 is on the bottom. M46 is located about 5545 light years away from earth and it has about 500 stars in the cluster. The age is around 251 million years old, making it an old open cluster. In the left portion of the cluster, there is actually a small planetary nebula called NGC 2438. You can see a photo of M46 cropped and see the nebula at the bottom of this page. The other open cluster, M47, is located at a much closer 1600 light years from earth, and this is why the stars in this cluster appears bigger and brighter. The age of this cluster is about 78 million years old, and have about 500 stars in the cluster. 
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Final Photo
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Final Photo Labelled
Details of How the shot was Taken
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Gear:
  • Olympus OMD EM-5 Micro 4/3 camera 
  • Skywatcher Star Adventurer (Unguided)
  • Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 lens
  • Home made dew heater
    • Made with nichrome wire wrapped in duct tape, which is powdered by a lipo battery 
​Acquisition & Environment:
  • 72x30 minute exposures (1.1 hours)
  • 400 iso @ 150mm (300 equivalent) F4
  • 70 Flat Frames
  • 70 Dark Frames
  • 70 Bias Frames
  • Taken: January 6, 2018
Processing:
  • Images processed in DeepSkyStacker
    • 2x Drizzle Stack
    • Brought Saturation to 17 and match all rgb levels
  • Photoshop Adjustments:
    • Cropped to remove stacking errors
    • Adjust Levels to bring Histogram to the front
    • Used RC-Astro's Gradient xterminator to remove the gradient the flats couldn't fix
    • Adjust Colour balance to adjust background colour to be neutral
    • Used Deep Sky Colours HLVG tool to remove any unnecessary greens in the photo
    • Used Astronomy tools make stars smaller and sharper
      • Also Ran a tool to decrease deep space noise
    • Increased the Saturation
    • Increased sharpness from inaccurate focusing 
    • Exported into jpeg
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M46 Cropped and Labelled
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M46 Cropped
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Raw File From the Camera