Taken on a moon-lit night in March I bring you two friendly Globular Clusters in the constallation Coma Berenices. Both of these clusters are near each other in the night sky and actually fairly close to each other as well in our Milky Way galaxy. M53 (lower left) is much bigger with a very compact core and NGC5053 (upper right) is smaller with much fewer stars. It seems that, despite it's appearance, NGC5053 has been confirmed as a Globular Cluster and not an open cluster. As always, feedback and constructive criticism on the image is encouraged!

**Acquisition:**

* Lights: 300x30s taken on the night of 2019-03-17

* Flats: 30x0.84s using t-shirt flats pointing at ceiling

* Dark Flats: 30x0.84s Same orientation as Flats with lid and jackets covering Optical Tube.

* Darks: 60x30s at -10C

* Bortle Dark-Sky Scale: 4.00

* Pixel scale: 0.981 arcsec/pixel

* Orientation: 9* degrees

**Pre-Processing with PixInsight:**

* Calibrated and stacked using [LVA PreProcessing Steps](http://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-pre-processing-calibrating-and-stacking-images-in-pixinsight.html)

* Integrated all 300 frames after sorting them through Blink and Subframe Selector.

* No local normalization

* CFA drizzled 1x scale 0.7 drop shrink

* Crop with Dynamic Crop

* Dynamic Background Extraction

* Background Neutralization

* Photometric Color Calibration

* RGB Working space to 1,1,1

**Luminance Processing**

* Extract Synthetic Luminance for Deconvolution

* Deconvolution with a Dynamic PSF L |> select 24 samples from center of image |> Export PSF

* Starmask for local support 0.3

* Global Dark: 0.0050

* Global Bright: 0.0010

* 3 layers of Poisson wavelet regularization

* Fix 1 brightest star cores that deconvolution introduced internal rings on by replacing them with the non-deconvolved image (clone stamp to create mask of the broken stars + pixel math ``L_Orig`` )

* Extract Synthetic Luminance for Noise Reduction

* Small Scale noise reduction using TGV Denoise

* Medium Scale Noise reduction using MMT

* Combine Decon image with NR image using a clipped and blurred luminance based mask and PixelMath ``L_Decon`` and ``L_NR`` with the mask inverted

* Stretch using masked stretch using a "Preview aggregator" of 5 different background previews as background reference.

* Applied 6-layer HDR using Median transofmration to back off the intensity of the globular's inner glow and a luminance mask

**RGB workflow:**

* Small Scale noise reduction using TGV Denoise

* Arcsinh Stretch to stretch non-linear

**LRGB Combination with 0.7 on L and 0.3 on saturation**

* Two rounds of curves to enhance contrast raise background level and increase saturation

* Adaptive Stretch to push the background down without clipping data (first time trying this but wanted to see how it did... criticism appreciated here)

* Motion Blur Deconvolution to address elongation of stars from poor guiding

* ACDNR and MMT to remove large scale chrominance noise in the background

* Crop for framing

* Save as JPEG