Messier 67

In 2024, I received a dataset of Messier 67 from Telescope Live, acquired with one of their observatories in Spain. Messier 67, located in the constellation Cancer, is one of the oldest known open clusters in the Milky Way, with an estimated age of about 4 billion years. Because the field lies far above the galactic plane, the background sky is exceptionally transparent—revealing a remarkable number of distant galaxies and quasars behind the cluster.

The depth of the Telescope Live dataset makes these background objects stand out with surprising clarity. In fact, the field contains so many extragalactic sources that a complete presentation would be overwhelming. For this reason, I chose to highlight only the quasars with redshifts greater than z > 3, corresponding to objects whose light has traveled more than 11 billion years before reaching us. These extremely distant quasars offer a striking contrast to the relatively nearby stars of the cluster, emphasizing the immense range of scales captured within a single deep-sky image.

The data calibration, registration and the final processing of the Telescope Live data was done with PixInsight. The result was as follows:

In the image you can find a lot of quasars. The most distant of them is:

WISEA J084328.20+102635.9 with a redshift of z=4.1

Here is an overview of the used equipment and the exposure times:

• Date: 2024
• Location: Spain
• Telescope/Lense: Takahashi FSQ106
• Focal length [mm]: 390
• Focal ratio: 3.6
• Mount: Paramount MX+
• Camera: QHY 600M Pro
• Autoguiding: yes
• Filter: L:R:G:B
• Exposure time [min]: 72:72:72:60
• Resolution: 2.02″/px