Kemble's Cascade is a line of about 20 stars in the constellation of Camelopardalis. It is named after Father Lucian Kemble (1922-1999), a Franciscan friar and amateur astronomer, who described it in a letter to Walter Houstan as "a beautiful cascade of faint stars tumbling from the northwest down to the open cluster NGC 1502" which he had discovered whilst sweeping the sky with binoculars. Houstan was so impressed he wrote an article in 1980 for Sky and Telescope naming the asterism Kemble's Cascade.
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I am pleased with this picture because I have captured at least some of the colours in these faint stars, something I have generally failed to do before. It was taken with my Canon 1000D DSLR camera fitted with a 70-300mm zoom lens set at 130mm. The cascade is the line of stars across the middle of the picture (move your mouse pointer over the picture to see it identified) and at its lower end is the cluster NGC 1502. Date and Time: 16 January 2012 19:28 UT Camera: Canon 1000D Telescope: 70-300 mm USM at 130 mm f/4.5 Capture: 30 seconds Processing: PhotoImpact: Size reduced to 25%, Focus Magic 4,100, background colour removed, and brightness reduced slightly. |
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This closer picture of the cascade was taken with a DFK 21AF04 camera fitted with a 135-mm SLR lens. The field of view was too small to encompass the whole cascade, so this is a mosaic of three pictures merged in iMerge and reduced to fit this page. NGC 1502 is near the left-hand edge and the bottom of the picture. To see the full-sized picture, click on the picture. Date and Time: 21 October 2016 23:00 UT Camera: DFK 21AF04 Telescope: 135mm SLR f/4.0 Capture: 27 seconds Processing: The mosaic was constructed from 3 images in iMerge. The resulting picture was darkened in PhotoImpact to reduce the background glow, and the picture was reduced in size and the colour saturation increased slightly. |