The Wild Duck Cluster (M11)

This open star cluster in the Milky Way is well known to amateur astronomers as a particularly rich and colorful cluster.  The colors reveal the temperatures of the stars, with blue stars being hotter and red stars being cooler.  Below is an image produced from a series of exposures taken by the 20-inch telescope at the UIS Barber Observatory on June 11, 2013.   This cluster contains about 2900 stars and has an estimated age of 220 million years (very young when we consider our own Sun is at least 4 billion years old).  The cluster is in the constellation Scutum at a distance of 6200 lightyears from Earth.