From Saturday night's stargazing I present the Wild Duck Cluster (M11).

'One of the richest and most compact of the galactic clusters.' (Burnham). M-11 contains an estimated 2900 stars, about 500 of which are brighter than mag 14.

It is found in the Scutum (The Shield) constellation just a bit north of Sagittarius.

Scutum was invented by Johannes Hevelius in 1690. Scutum was originally drawn as the Coat of Arms of Scutum (John) Sobieskii, king of Poland, who so distiguished himself in defending his land against the Turks when they marched on Vienna on September 12, 1683; the Turks were turned back at the gates of the city. And seven years later Scutum was created in honor of his victory.

I didn't know it at the time, just picked a nice, twinkly cluster to try and photograph. Ended up going out again Sunday night to relocate and identify it.

To take the photo I did the best I could to focus (an ever elusive goal) and then took a 48 second shot at ISO 200. Followed that up with an equally long shot with the telescope lens cover on (I could probably use a better timing technique than counting Mississippi). In photoshop the "dark" shot is layered on top of the real shot and applied using difference. This gets rid of most of the digital camera noise.

Another technique I've tried, with mixed results, is to take multiple shots and combine them. The idea being that with each successive layer you strengthen the real objects and lose the noise.

Here's another shot taken somewhere in the northern section of the Milky Way.