At a magnitude of 6.2, M3 is a popular object for visual observers and easy target for imagers. It is composed of around a half million stars located nearly 34,000 lyrs from Earth. Although some recent theories question their age, globular clusters have long been thought to be among the oldest objects in the galaxy. M3 is believed to be about 11.4 billion years old. The celestial mechanics of these objects have been modeled in some detail and it's fascinating to try to imagine how a cluster of a half million stars in such close proximity can remain stable over billions of years without collapsing in on itself! M3 is an especially well studied cluster because it contains a large number of variable stars, which are fundamental to measuring "nearby" galactic distances.

Since interesting narrow band objects are sparse during late April, the data for this image was gathered during the last full moon cycle. Of course the moon introduces background sky-gradients and stray reflections in the telescope itself, which caused all kinds of unusual difficult problems with this data set. I also discovered that my flat data had gone "bad" with the appearance of numerous new dust motes so I had to refresh my flat data. One prominent mote must have appeared while this data was being collected and I simply could not get it to calibrate out so I had to clone stamp it out of existence. My data yield during this run was pretty good with roughly 40% of the data being useable; although clouds shut me down a few times while I worked on this project. I took a fair amount of high quality Lum data but wound up not using it so this image has been process using only the RGB data. Whenever I scan the Milky Way with my binoculars, I'm amazed at the intense colors of many of the stars so one thing that I tried to accomplish with this image is to show some of that same brilliance in the star colors. To do that I used Mark Shelly's arcsinh() tool in PI to stretch the data. The tool is pretty finicky but once you get it set up properly, it does a really nice job of preserving the star colors through the stretch.

Anyway, I hope that the result workable so let me know what you think. As usual, C&C is always welcome, so fire a way...

John