I have to confess that the update I provide is not really timely. When I am writing the lines you are reading here almost 14 years have passed since the picture was taken. I was so hesitant to post it because it was just a test shot to explore the best reducer/flattener for my 80mm ED refractor that served my early endeavours in digital astrophotography for so many years. It was not more than 30 minutes of effecive exposure time that I spent. But nonetheless both the number of stars and the striking patterns of interstellar dust obscuring the regions behind is breathtaking. And the star cluster itself appears to be the topping on the cake...
The picture belongs to a series of exposures I took back in 2007 when I made my first attempts to capture the sky with digital technology. Blame it on some kind of sentimental mood that it finally made it to my library of postings...
The open cluster is located in one of the brightest milky way regions visible from central European locations and is also called the "Wild Duck Cluster". It was discovered by Gottfired Kirch in 1681. But it took another more than 80 years until Charles Messier officially included it into the famus catalogue of comet-like objects.