M36 sometimes called the Pinwheel Cluster, is an open cluster in the constellation Auriga. There are three Messier object in Auriga M36, M37, and M38 all of which are open clusters. I decided to go for M36 not just because it's the first in the list within the constellation, but because it seemed to be the brightest of the three. M36 is roughly 4,100 light-years away, and about 14 light years in diameter. It is about 25 million years old which astronomically speaking is rather young. M36 has an irregular shape and the stars are in a chain like pattern.
Although not visible with the naked eye as I was scanning the area I came across a faint cluster of stars using the 32mm eyepiece. Not too many were very bright, but there were a few stand-out stars. About 15 stars in the heart of the cluster most of which visible with averted vision. Some seemed somewhat hidden close to the brighter stars making them harder to pick out. When I stepped up the magnification with the 12.5mm the harder to see stars before seemed to pop out in the eyepiece a bit more. Roughly the same amount of stars this time in the heart of the cluster, but then averted vision brought out a few more of the dimmer stars unseen with the 32mm.
Click for larger image.
Also throughout the night starting around 5pm I setup my camera to take a 30 second picture ever 5 seconds. The shutter speed was 30 seconds, F3.1, ISO400, takes 30 seconds to process one image, so each picture took 1 minute+/-. I had this running from 5pm to 3am and got 457 images. I took these images and made them into a time lapse video. A little bit of jostling of the camera by some wind gusts, but all in all this time lapse came out pretty good. I've attempted a few before like this one when I had no luck. This time though I only had a short batch of thin clouds come in for a short time during imaging.
Time lapse video, best watched full screen in HD (everything's better in HD).
When scrolling through the pics of this video before making it I saw some streaks across the sky, most of them were planes, except one in the lower left corner that was extremely bright near the beginning of the video. If you didn't see it, watch it again and look for it. At first I thought I had caught a meteor, then looking online at CalSky it showed that there was an Iridium Flare from an antenna 5 minutes later than the picture was taken and 6 minutes later was an Iridium Flare from a solar panel. After some looking on the site and then checking my camera I found that my time is 5 minutes off which would make these images a direct affect of an Iridium Flare.
Still a faint streak in the lower left in the frame after the previous one. Click to Enlarge.
Some info on Iridium Flares. They are from an Iridium Satellite which is a relatively small telecommunications satellite in a low Earth orbit. They're part of a world-wide system for mobile communications. Each satellite has three main mission antennas (MMAs) which are flat, highly reflective surfaces that can reflect the suns rays when hit just right. These Iridium Flares can be as bright as a -8 magnitude which for comparison bright Venus can reach a magnitude of -4.9.
That's not it either. I then took these 457 images and brought them into another program and made pretty star trails out of them. Again you can see the wobble from the wind, but again this came out pretty good for a first. This won't be the last!
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