NGC 2516 a.k.a Southern Beehive

NGC 2516, a.k.a Southern Beehive, Cadwell 96, or the Sprinter, is a young open star cluster in Carina, similar in age to the Pleiades cluster.
The “Southern Beehive” name is due to its resemblance to the northern Beehive Cluster, a.k.a M44. Studies narrow it down to 362 cluster members with a total mass between 800 and 1500 solar masses, ~1175 - 1240 ly away.

The cluster is home to several evolved red giants, binaries/variables, emissions, and chemically peculiar stars hence the subject of interest and constantly studied. The X-ray emission stars in this cluster served as a bore sight calibration target for Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observatories.

The three main visual double stars, HJ 4027, HJ 4031, and I 29, are highlighted in the annotated image in cyan along with other double stars.

LRGB 40m (4x2x300s) taken from CHI-2 an ASA 500N, a 50-cm F3.8 corrected Newtonian telescope with ASA DDM85 equatorial mount with direct drives, FLI PL 16803 camera with Astrodon LRGB 2GEN Filters, situated in Rio Hurtado valley, Chile. Taken on 25th Dec 2021.

Processed in PixInsight. Most of the processing time went into deconvolving the luminance with different PSFs and masks to bring out the double stars as much as possible. The annotation for double stars was rendered by importing the Washington double star catalog to the AnnotateImage script.