It has been a little quiet around here lately... probably because of that darn moon.

I love it when I can point my telescope at the Milky Way and take pictures of open clusters.

I took a wide field h-alpha image of the area around Sharpless 2-101 a few weeks ago which also included the open clusters NGC 6883 and NGC 6871.  I went back and took a look at a color image I took of this field a couple of years ago and re-processed it to bring out a little more of the red emission nebula that is everywhere in the background. 

TheSkyX tells me that there are 7 different open clusters in this field that are contained in its databases.

Here is a link to the Astrobin "fit to window" view.  Take a look at 100% resolution view by clicking on the full resolution button in the upper right corner.

https://www.astrobin.com/full/355961/B/

Some of the highlights of this field are:

- NGC 6883, the bright group of stars just to the left of center,
- NGC 6871, the bright group right of center, about half way to the right edge,
- Biurakan 2 and Biurakan 1 are between NGC 6883 and NGC 6871, Biurakan 2 is on the left,
- Dolidze 3 at the upper left corner,
- Dolidze 1 at top center, a little bit down from the bright white star,
- IC 1310 is at center bottom.

There are numerous Barnard and Lynd's Dark Nebula scattered throughout the field that are partially obscured by the multitudes of foreground stars.

I used my trusty AP900 for this one.

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Dean Jacobsen
http://astrophoto.net/wp/
Image Gallery - http://astrophoto.net/wp/image-gallery/
Astrobin - https://www.astrobin.com/users/deanjacobsen/