M9 - Diamonds and Dust (AstroDarkSky)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Ophiuchus (Oph) · Contains: B64 · HD156132 · LDN 173 · LDN 175 · M 9 · NGC 6333

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M9 - Diamonds and Dust

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M9 - Diamonds and Dust

The vision behind this capture was to show a contrast between the large glittering mass of stars in the M9 cluster with the opposite extreme of complete darkness in the nearby dust.

Challenges:
There are just so many stars in the field at this angle that is really difficult to create focus on the main objects. Star reduction was practically impossible because there are so many that even a small nudge of reduction ends up creating worm effects of adjoining pixels. So the star field remains pretty much unaltered.

Processing:
Most globular cluster appear a little one-note to me - white. This one has a lot of color hiding in the data. I did not tweak the color balance beyond neutral at all on this one. Just a great variety in star heat emission levels/age.

Maybe not the most photogenic, wow factor of all targets, but scientifically it is interesting to see such a large variety of stars with a wide variety in colors in a small section of sky.

Title inspired by the Judas P. song as a fun musical trivia for any astro hard rock/metal fans out there. :-)

Messier Objects
Images from the EdgeHD Series

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7904080
PixInsight job	TCPMUJMXEULFRFZ6BJ5815P8RWLZWYIY
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	17h18m12s.406
RA (top/left)	17h16m23s.895
RA (top/right)	17h19m58s.883
RA (bottom/right)	17h20m00s.137
RA (bottom/left)	17h16m25s.912

Dec (center)	-18°31′09″.69
Dec (top/left)	-18°47′09″.90
Dec (top/right)	-18°47′43″.16
Dec (bottom/right)	-18°15′08″.97
Dec (bottom/left)	-18°14′30″.75

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M9 - Diamonds and Dust

M9 - Diamonds and Dust

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M9 - Diamonds and Dust

M9 - Diamonds and Dust

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