Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Serpens (Ser)  ·  Contains:  5 Ser  ·  IC 4537  ·  M 5  ·  NGC 5904  ·  The star 5Ser
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M5 - RB & Fake G (2019), Kurt Zeppetello
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M5 - RB & Fake G (2019)

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M5 - RB & Fake G (2019), Kurt Zeppetello
Powered byPixInsight

M5 - RB & Fake G (2019)

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Description

This is only my second image of M5, a globular star cluster residing in the galactic halo (area above and below the main disk). Globular clusters are very old and M5 is certainly that at 13 billion years old. At 25,000 light-years away in the constellation Serpens and approximately 165 light-years in diameter it contains more than 100,000 stars.

What do I mean by Fake G? When I combined the RGB in PI in noticed a magenta splotch in many of the stars. Upon further analysis I discovered they were only in the green channel. I tried doing things in PI and PS with no success so I made a synthetic (fake) green channel by combining the Red and Blue using the PixelMath function in PI. It worked as the splotches are gone.

I am guessing the image would be better with a real green channel but it is orders of magnitude better than my embarrassing image from three years ago (https://astroquest1.blogspot.com/search?q=M5). I will try to adjust the real green channel to improve the overall image after getting some suggestions from AB user Michael Feigenbaum. I cropped the image a bit but wanted to keep the large star 5-Serpentis in the image and I prefer wider field images anyway.

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M5 - RB & Fake G (2019), Kurt Zeppetello

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