M53 and NGC 5053 (Michael Feigenbaum)

M53 and NGC 5053

Here we have a duo of globular clusters, M53 and NGC 5053 in Coma Berenices. These two clusters lie approximately 60,000 ly away with NGC 5053 being a little bit closer. M53 is, as is typical of globulars, quite metal poor which makes it very old indeed. There is a great quantity of Blue Stragglers evident in this cluster, the nature of which still remains a mystery. M53 has greater than 500,000 stars.

NGC 5053 is a much looser cluster containing approximately 3,500 stars.

Source- messier-objects.com

This was an interesting imaging project. The first thing I did was using Alex Woronow's fine weighting tool, I culled almost half of my integration in an attempt to see if using only the best frames results in a better image. It is my belief that even with the rather short total integration time, the 351 separate frames would provide that which is needed to swamp the noise.

I also wanted to try to reduce the gain to half-unity to increase dynamic range for this one. However, when I stacked I was surprised to find horrendous vertical banding. Of course, I checked and rechecked my calibration files and stacked and re-stacked the data to no avail.

So during the full moon, I thought I would try the Canon banding removal tool in Pixinsight to see if this data could be salvaged. After playing with that for a while, I learned it works great but one must extract the three channels from the RGB image and apply it to each and then recombine. I also extracted and processed the luminance from this image separately so I could apply some deconvolution and then added the L channel back in when I stretched everything to non-linear. There are still some artifacts from that banding problem but not nearly as noticeable.

So all in all, an interesting project and I hope you like it!

Clear Skies to all!

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Status	Advanced failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3492752
PixInsight job	FEKJJ4JESZ5A2N3J5V3BL7SYKVLA11QF
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	PLATE_SOLVING_IMAGE

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M53 and NGC 5053

M53 and NGC 5053

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M53 and NGC 5053

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