Messier 3, OortCloud

Messier 3

Messier 3, OortCloud

Messier 3

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Messier 3 (NGC 5272) is a globular cluster located 33,900ly away in the constellation Canes Venatici, and is one of the three brightest globular clusters in the northern sky. It contains approximately 500,000 stars, and is visible to the naked eye from dark skies.

The cluster has an age of roughly 8 billion years and contains mostly old, red stars. But it also contains a relatively large number of so-called "Blue Stragglers", blue main-sequence stars which appear to be much younger than the rest of the globular's stellar population. Once puzzling to astronomers, these stars are now thought to form as a result of stellar interactions; their cooler outer layers are stripped away in close encounters, which occur when they pass through the dense central regions of the cluster. Also visible about halfway to the edge of the frame to the right, is NGC 5263, a spiral galaxy 238,000,000ly away that is receding from us at 1.6% the speed of light.

Equipment:

-William Optics Zenithstar 73mm FPL-53 doublet APO refractor.

-William Optics Flat73r focal reducer/field flattener.

-SkyWatcher EQ6R-Pro equatorial mount.

-ZWO ASI533MC-Pro color camera with ZWO luminance filter.

-William Optics Uniguide 32mm guide scope.

-ZWO ASI462MC color camera with Antlia 685nm IR-pass filter.

-ZWO ASIair Pro.

Pre-processing/Calibration performed in DeepSkyStacker:

-29 120-second lights (gain 100), calibrated with temperature matched darks, flats, and bias frames (30 each at minus 10 degrees Celsius).

-Debayered with Auto Homogeneity Directed interpolation.

-Stacked with Auto Adaptive Weighted Average algorithm.

-Export to 3-plane FITS.

Post-processing performed in Siril:

-Crop.

-Background Extraction.

-Photometric Color Calibration.

-Arcsinh Transformation.

-Remove Green Noise.

-Export to TIFF.

Final image adjustments performed in GIMP:

-Histogram adjustment (Levels, Curves).

-Fine tune colors (Curves).

-Increase saturation (Color Saturation).

-Contrast adjustment (Curves).

-Export to PNG.

Shot from my light polluted back yard (Bortle 6-7) under a 3.4% illuminated waxing crescent Moon.

Comments

Histogram

Messier 3, OortCloud