SUNSET: 
0
Photographer:
Hal Heaton
Location of Photo:
Chilescope
Date/Time of photo:
February 19, 2024
Equipment:
Field-corrected ASA Newtonian telescope 3 (aperture 0.5m, f-no 3.8); FLI ProLine 16803 CCD camera with RGB filters; 300s exposures stacked for 20 min in each band; acquisition scale 0.9 arcsec/px
Description:
The Jewel Box Cluster (NGC 4755) lies in the southern Milky Way constellation Crux (the Southern Cross) just 2.5 degrees above the plane of the Galaxy. Situated about 57 degrees from the Galaxy’s center, its most likely distance from Earth is 6651 lys based on parallax measurements from GAIA DR2. The four most prominent blue stars at its center are all spectral type B supergiants with apparent blue magnitudes of 6-7. The captivating orange star is also a supergiant (type M, visual magnitude 9.8). Although these marquis stars capture our attention, the full cluster has at least 652 members. This RGB-colored synthetic luminance image, processed using CCDStack v. 2.95 and GIMP v. 2.10.36, spans a field-of-view that is approximately 24 arcmin on a side. North is up and east is to the left.
