M13, Dark Sky Geek

M13

M13, Dark Sky Geek

M13

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Here is a photograph of the famous Hercules cluster, also known as Messier 13 or M13. It is a spectacular globular cluster, located 22,000 light years away from Earth in the constellation Hercules. It is composed of several hundred thousand stars.

I took this photograph last week, between May 1st and May 5th, from my house, located in the middle of a "white zone" — 8 on the Bortle scale — in San Jose, CA. In plain English, it means that I live in a very light polluted area... And yet, this image shows that modern equipment has made it possible to obtain decent results in spite of those terrible conditions.

This image is the result of 18 hours of exposure over 4 nights.

During processing, I rejected as many as 50% of the subframes to only keep those with little eccentricity and lowest FWHM. I also weighed the remaining subs for sharpness.

- Telescope: Astro-Tech AT130EDT with HoTech SCA field flattener

- Mount: iOptron CEM70

- Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro (OSC)

- 550 x 2 minute exposures with Astronomik L3 (luminance filter)

- Processed in PixInsight

Comments

Histogram

M13, Dark Sky Geek