Messier 14 in Ophiuchus (Michael Feigenbaum)

Messier 14 in Ophiuchus

Here we have a try at Messier 14 in Ophiuchus. This is a globular cluster with a Shapely-Sawyer classification of VIII which is described as "Rather loosely concentrated towards the center", lying approximately 30,300 light years away in Ophiuchus. The glob spans about 100 light years in diameter and contains about 150,000 stars. The stars in the cluster only have about 5% the metalacity of the sun and the cluster is therefore estimated to be very old, on the order of 13 billion years. - credit Messier-Objects.com

In a recent image I mentioned that I did not particularly like the stars from this C9.25HD. I also mentioned that that could easily be an operator problem and not necessarily any issue with the telescope or its design. In any case, I spent a little time working on my imaging train and made this image to see if the stars were better. I thought doing a globular in a richly populated area like Ophiuchus might be a good test.

Not sure what others may think but to me, it looks like the stars shown are pretty nice over the almost APS-C FOV of the image. I made a star profile in Pixinsight to look at the form of the PSFs in 3-D too. I attached that plot and to my eye, I think the PSF shapes are nice with only the brightest being clipped.

In any case, I think perhaps I should not have denigrated the SCT stars as these look as good as any I've ever managed.

I hope you like this one, CS and good health!

PS. I included a crop at 3008 x 3008 which are the dimensions of the 533 sensor. I am considering purchasing one of these for small targets. Unless I am mistaken, that 533 sensor is similar to the 2600 chip and if so, I think will be a great camera for small targets.

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Title: 3d plot

Uploaded: ...

Globular Star Clusters
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7895040
PixInsight job	A14X70JELHZBUVWKVFGH9XMZJJHYQ2ID
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	17h37m36s.480
RA (top/left)	17h36m12s.819
RA (top/right)	17h39m06s.547
RA (bottom/right)	17h38m59s.999
RA (bottom/left)	17h36m06s.175

Dec (center)	-03°14′53″.13
Dec (top/left)	-03°31′27″.25
Dec (top/right)	-03°29′07″.10
Dec (bottom/right)	-02°58′16″.84
Dec (bottom/left)	-03°00′37″.51

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