NGC 3201 is magnitude 8.24 Globular Cluster in Vela just over 18 acrminutes in size about 16310 light years from earth. It has an estimated to be about 157,000 times the mass of the Sun and is about 10.24 billion years old. It is unusual in that stellar population of this cluster is inhomogeneous, varying with distance from the core. The effective temperature of the stars shows an increase with greater distance, with the redder and cooler stars tending to be located closer to the core.  Because it is a less dense globular cluster avoiding core collapse it is believed to contain a sub-cluster of over a hundred stellar mass black holes, with roughly a thousand solar masses harbor  in its core. This image is a small crop from the center of a 4 degree field. As that also contains 89 PGC Galaxies if I can get another decent run on this field I might upload that field too.

Finally one fairly clear night with ordindary seeing and and waning moon was the first RGB opportunity in a month!

The Redcat 71 on an AM5 performed flawlessly and ASI Air is a doddle to use but annoyingly inflexible once the run starts. I can also carry it outside fully loaded and have it level and polar aligned to within less than 20 acrseconds in 10 minutes.  That turned out to be a blessing as the 127is in my pump shed  with Feathertouch focuser on a MYT and a now venerable QSI690Wsg8 ** was beset with autofocus and guiding problems later in the evening. Possibly something snagged after the Meridian flip.  When the seeing is good it works fine but Sequence Generator Autofocus is bizzare these days. Run it once initated manully generally no problems. Run it automatically in a sequence and it spends forever charging into the blurring wilderness even after finding the optimum point of the VCurve (??) so I cancel and apply that manually.  So I finally parked it, let the Redcat finish it's run and went to bed.  If I have a few more clear nights to burn I might save some money on SGP subscription charges and switch to Nina to see if it can manage autofocus as effortlessly as ASI Air and the ZWO EAF which has never missed a beat. Not once.

** Hey it still works after 10 years! and the chip size is perfect for the 127.