Sketch of NGC 457 - E.T. Cluster

Meade LS 8 ACF
26 mm PL @ 78x   Seeing 3/5  Transparency 4/5

This was a very cool open cluster I had learned about in October, so I recently decided to sketch it myself to add to my collection. A big hit for our outreach, and surprisingly easy from urban skies. Can you make out E.T.?

Podcast - Finders & The E.T. Cluster

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We discuss the types of finders that are available as upgrade options or that are included with many of the new telescopes on the market today. Next, I briefly talk about one of my favorite open clusters, the E.T. Cluster, or NGC 457. It's now one of my favorites, and I'm sure the next time you have a chance to have view this open cluster at the eyepiece of your telescope, it will become one of your favorites as well. Below is a Telrad chart so that you can find NGC 457 yourself.

Jupiter w/Meade LS 8, cleaned up and stacked

I decided to play around even more with Registax on the original AVI file I took of Jupiter a few weeks back, and I’m glad I did. I’m happy to tease out some decent detail within the NEB. I can clearly see a white oval, and I was especially happy to make out the diagonal feature in the NEB as well, its to the left of center about a third of the way to the edge of the disk.  Some dark features too exist on the edge of the North Equatorial Belt with the Equatorial belt. Also with this image are the additional North Tropic and Temperate belts, and I can even see that there were some detail in the North Polar region.  I’m just scratching the surface with this limited imaging setup I have, but I’m beginning to realize that there’s more detail in some of these images, and spending more time with them and Registax is worth the effort.