Apologies if I'd already posted this one, I don't remember... it was taken a little white back though.
"The Sprinter", aka star cluster NGC 2516. This pretty group of stars can be easily seen by the naked eye as a misty/sparkly patch near the southern tip of the False Cross (made from the stars of Vela and Carina). While it appears to span almost two moon diameters in size, this cluster lies 1,300 light-years away in space.
This image was taken on the morning of the 4th of January at 2am, with a nearly full-moon still in the sky. It is made from a stack of 60 15-second exposures at ISO800 with a Nikon D5100 and IDAS filter on a 6" F/5 Newtonian telescope. This stack images was combined in Deep-Sky Stacker with flat and bias corrective images and then post-processed in Adobe Photoshop.
