Messier 44 is one of the brightest and largest open star clusters in the northern sky. It spans about 3 times the diameter of the full moon in constellation Cancer and counts about 1000 stars.

Born about 600 million years ago in a vast cloud of dust and gas it has meanwhile cleaned up the interstellar space by the intense radiation of its big young stars. Its distance is estimated to be about 600 light years from earth, a similar distance as the even larger Hyades cluster which it might be related to. Both clusters move on similar trajectories through our Milky Way galaxy and the star populations of both clusters are remarkably similar. Although still pretty young they contain already numerous white dwarfs and red giants, stars in very late stages of their life cycle.
This is first light of my (second hand) WO Z61 and I thought I choose an easy target. It turned out however that the optical setup of the instrument includes some sensor tilt which seems to be very tricky to remove.
Under this conditions a simple star image is not as easy to process as it might look at first sight.

William Optics Z61/F5.9 with Flattener
F=360mm
EQ6R Pro
ZWO ASI 2600mc Pro
No filter
Bortle 4-5
No moon
130x30sec (1h5m)

PixInsight