Collinder 399 or Brocchi’s Cluster is offered nicknamed “The Coathanger” for its striking resemblance to that wardrobe item! If you look at the stars in the middle of the image and it looks very much like a coathanger on its side. It is located within the constellation of Vulpecula – The Fox – within a larger asterism called The Summer Triangle. The Coathanger is a chance, line-of-sight effect and the stars that form the appearance of the coathanger are not physically associated with each other at all and range from 350 to 2300 light years in distance.
The stars are backdropped against the vast clouds of glowing hydrogen that dominate the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.
Image Technical Data
Uncompressed version of the image is here (opens in new tab).
Image captured in my backyard in Nottingham, UK on Sunday 20th September 2020. I used a Samyang (Rokinon) 135mm DSLR lens with a Moravian Instruments G2-8300 cooled CCD camera. This was mounted on my NEQ6 mount and guided with a Skywatcher Evoguider and ASI120MM guidecam. All exposures are binned 1×1.
Red > 12 x 300s; Green 10 x 300s; Blue 11 x 300s
All processing is done in PixInsight and image capture was with SGP.
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