After returning from a ski vacation down in Tahoe, I returned to the expectation of a night of clear weather here in the damp PNW.  Instead, I got two and a half clear nights!  Wanting to begin contributing to the Astrobin Community Survey (ABS), I packed away the new FLT91 and got out the Rokinon 135 f/2.  A new UV/IR cut filter was recieved a couple weeks ago (see here for the reasoning) and I wanted to confirm that this new filter was the solution to my unwittingly/unfortunately rediscoving many haloed Long Period Variable stars using this fast portrait lens.  I am happy to report that the UV/IR cut filter has solved the issue!  I spent the first, not completely clear night working a bit on tilt and backfocus.

Over mostly the next two nights, I worked on two fields for the ABS.  During both these nights my targets were early and eventually disappeared behing some tall shrubs, so later, to finish through the morning with the rising quarter moon, I pointed my rig toward M13.  This was a quick decision and maybe not well thought out.  This is galaxy season, and that means lots of stars and certainly galaxies.  This is not that sort of field.  I did want to see M13 in a large field to reminisce about my visual astronomy days, using my f4 MakNewt with a widefield eyepiece.  I think this sort of worked!  But I also saw in my framing page that I could try to capture two Abell galaxy clusters as well.  These clusters are the NGC groupings lower left of center in the plate solve.  Yet there are others, mostly on the left side of center in this framing.  Small galaxies, I believe, are not really the forte of the Rokinon.  So the workup here caused me some pain in trying to get those smallish galaxies in a very wide field to show up at all.  I do not believe that I pulled this off.  I wanted to not reduce stars too much, but I did a bit via different methods.  Mostly, I limited the stretch.  I also both enhanced M13 to bring it more above the starfield, and reduced it when trying to bring out a bit more detail toward the core.  Given its size in the field, I did not try to resolve to the core.  Little point in that given the scale here!  However, to resolve at least some of the stars in M13, I dithered and used 2X drizzle to overcome the very undersampled data.  And it is surprizing just how much can be seen, including blue stragglers and red giants, etc.  Finally, the galaxies were having none of this treatment with such a wimpy optic!  So to get them to even show a little, I boosted the signal of the key contributers in this frame a bit.  In fact 3.5 hrs at f/2 is pretty deep even in my Bortle 4 location and all of the NGC galaxies are accounted for in this image, even after suffering losses from star reduction via the use of SXT.  And I post a revision showing also a plate solve with the PGC catalog.  All those galaxies are accounted for in the image as well, though all of them are just tiny dots with this lens!  In fact, there are quite a few fainter objects that are sub threshold and not part of these catalogs.