Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Sagittarius (Sgr)  ·  Contains:  M 22  ·  NGC 6656
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M22, rhedden
M22
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M22

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M22, rhedden
M22
Powered byPixInsight

M22

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Description

This image shows the globular cluster M22 in Sagittarius, which I always thought was just as impressive as M13. Its low elevation from North America makes it challenging for us to image, since the images are being taken at a low angle through a thick layer of air. Low elevation is a real problem for imaging globulars, since sharp stars and good colors are two of the things one wants to see in the final image, and both are compromised. I waited for a night with good seeing and very little wind to shoot this one.

The image was taken with my C11 Edge at f/7 with oversampled (0.55"/pixel), short subs to allow me to use a lot of deconvolution on the luminance. RGB subs were 180 s duration (5 of each color). The luminance stack was median-combined with 31 images of 60 s and 24 images of 180 s in a single stack.

To prepare the final image, I stacked two layers with an aggressively deconvoluted luminance on the bottom and a non-deconvoluted (slightly blurry) LRGB image on top for star colors. A grayscale copy of the top layer was used as a layer mask so that only the bright, colorful pixels would transfer onto the sharpened luminance image beneath. The result retains the star colors and still shows sharpened stars. Layer stacking was done in GIMP.

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