Canon 350D Hap Griffin Baader Mod
9x180sec at iso 1600
30 Darks/Flats/Bias
APM/TMB 130/780 with APM Field Flattener

M29 (NGC 6913) is an unimpressive grouping of about 50 stars embedded deeply in the dust of this dense region of the milky way. W.A. Hiltner of Yerkes Observatory, in 1954, found the light of its stars rather polarized by interstellar matter, which is apparently 1,000 times denser around this cluster and may absorb so much light that the cluster would be 3 magnitudes brighter if viewed "freely" or "in the clear".

M29's five hottest stars are all blue giants of spectral class B0, but because of this "embedding" in the dust of the central Cygnus region, they to appear more red in visual images - shifting to a color index nearer 0.6 to 0.7 listed in Cartes du Ciel - or a color more like that of our Sun. In near infrared, the true colors are more evident.

M29 is included in the Cygnus OB1 association, and approaching us at 28 km/sec. Its age is estimated at 10 million years, at an uncertain distance of about 6000 light years.

November 26, 2008