The last weeks were kinda hard for me and sadly there are other things in life which had to be done. That's the price you have to pay, if there is more than one hobby one has. But luckily, the weather wasn't too bad and I was still able to collect data, although I did not use every clear night because I needed some break now and then. This weekend though I was even able to do some processing.

So I tried to keep things simple. Last night, the moon was about 80% and the beautiful emission nebulae were still really low in the sky. So I decided to get some data of M13, although the moon was so bright. But I plan to do some changes to my setups to prepare myself for what is to me the main season of astro photogrphy. I still had the LRGB setup active and simply didn't have the time and nerves to fiddle with problems. So that's the reason for my decition.

I already took an image of M13 in 2021. Back then I used an Explore Scientific MN152 comet hunter that suffered from heavy optical problems. That was sad, because the whole concept of the scope seemed to fit my needs really well. But the fact that I had so much problems with it kept me from buying my always favorite Explore Scientific 127ED APO with the carbon tube. About half a year ago, there was a speicial offer I saw and after many days of ringing with myself, I took the opportunity to buy it. So far, it was a really good decition. So yesterday, I thought it might be a good choice to retry M13 with this scope. The mount and even the camera used were the same as 3 years ago. That could be interesting...

Because we had mixed weather conditions yesterday, I did not expect the night to be clear. But beside some small clouds now and then, the observing conditions were better than expected and stayed that way until the morning. So I was able to collect about 4 hours of LRGB data. The rest was deleted because of the clouds.

I processed the image in a slightly different way than I usually do. The RGB master data is simply the stack of the subs as usual. However, the L master is a combination of all subs I took which also includes RGB subs as well. I wanted the SNR ratio to be as high as possible with the so lala data I had. The rest is straight forward. Although the dark areas still have its problems, I may argue that I have slightly improved since my last try. To me, the difference of both images is night and day.

So I am really happy with the improvement and I am looking forward to my summer break. Then I have two months of time for myself and I have no other responibilities. I plan to do some work on my observatory and hopefully will be ready if the days are getting shorter again to aim my scope to the most interesting targets again.