M3, taken after the nearly full moon rose. I was shooting the Leo Triplet while the moon was below the horizon, but once it rose I switched to something brighter like this nice globular cluster. I attempted to improve star shape a bit (wide open the 400mm lens gives stars some slight artifacts) by using 62mm aperture mask. It helped a little.
I left it roughly the full frame, so the cluster is a bit small, but there was a few faint fuzzy galaxies near the left edge I did not want to crop out. I did use photometric color calibration but the core had a definite magenta tone to it. I later did auto white balance on the core itself which mostly tamed it, but not sure if my colors are spot on perfect anymore. Also had a bit of noise so had to apply some noise reduction which I hope was not too heavy handed.
M3 was the first Messier object to be discovered by
Charles Messier himself (may 3, 1764)!
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