This is a good season for star clusters. There are plenty of open clusters visible in the evening. Open clusters especially are all over the place; to name a few, there's M36, M37, M38, M35, M44, M67, M46, M47, M50, .... well you get the idea. They're not all Messier ("M") objects but he certainly picked up the majority of the really obvious ones.
Here's an image I took last night of M44, the Beehive Cluster, also known as Praesepe. Click here for a larger version of the image. M44 is a very wide field cluster, in fact this image does not capture it all and it's over 1 degree wide. It is easily visible to the naked eye. Steven James O'Meara wrote about M44 in one of the astronomy magazines recently, and it has a lot of lore associated with it.
The image isn't too spectacular, last night was clear but the seeing wasn't the best and my mount was not tracking perfectly. M44 is actually a bit difficult for an unusual reason, the stars are so bright that they bloom in my camera. The bloom removal process in CCDStack is nice but it does leave some artifacts, which I didn't feel like spending the time to clean up in Photoshop.
However the reddish color to some of the stars is real. If you look at M44 through an eyepiece you can see the red colors. Seeing star colors visually is one of my favorite challenges with a telescope and is one reason that I always enjoy observing clusters. It's possible that I won't get a chance to visually appreciate M44 and other clusters until the upcoming Messier Marathon in March.
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