M13 - Great Hercules Cluster

[Dave Smith]

It was clear again last night (this morning) so had my first guided attempt at M13.

The first picture shows the full field of view and the second is a cropped part of the same image.

Dave

[Dave]

Nice one Dave.

Some faint stars in there and not overdone either.

You've caught NGC 6207 nicely as well.

Dave

[Dave Smith]

Thanks Dave

Dave

[Pete Presland]

wow another winner ! what were the capture details for us learners

[Coco]

Very nice indeed , one of my favourite targets

[Dave Smith]

wow another winner ! what were the capture details for us learners

Oops, sorry I forgot to add the details.

15 x 5 minute sub exposures with a Canon 40D through a Vixen FL102S telescope (102mm diam and FL 900mm F8.8 refractor). Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and processed in photoshop CS2 (including an application of Neat Image noise reduction software)

Dave

[Adz]

Great shot of M13! I like the fuzzies appearing too

[Uranium235]

Hi Dave, hope you dont mind but I ran a couple of Noels actions on your jpeg to clean up the horizontal banding and boost the star colour. Not sure if there should be that many red stars in M13 though need something to compare it against.

[PRICEMAN]

Absolutely stunning

Leigh

[Dave Smith]

Hi Dave, hope you dont mind but I ran a couple of Noels actions on your jpeg to clean up the horizontal banding and boost the star colour. Not sure if there should be that many red stars in M13 though need something to compare it against.

I am very happy for anyone to try to improve any of my images. I will try Noel's actions for the banding but those red stars don't look right to me. I haven't seen anything like that on others images. The effect may have been caused by my use of Neat Image to reduce colour noise. I'll have another play with it in the morning.

Dave

[Dave Smith]

Many thanks bunnygod1, Coco, Adz and Leigh for your comments.

Dave

[ollypenrice]

It's good and sharp. Re noise, I'd have thought five minute subs at f 8.8 were a bit short, maybe?

Olly

[Dave Smith]

It's good and sharp. Re noise, I'd have thought five minute subs at f 8.8 were a bit short, maybe?

Olly

Thanks for that Olly. I only did 5 min subs as the sky wasn't very dark and M13 is relatively bright. Also I probably need a longer total exposure. I will give it another go when the nights get a bit longer.

Dave

[astroman001]

Very nice Dave, I like the wide field view with contrasting star colours and the faint galaxy lower left.

regards

peetr

[ollypenrice]

Thanks for that Olly. I only did 5 min subs as the sky wasn't very dark and M13 is relatively bright. Also I probably need a longer total exposure. I will give it another go when the nights get a bit longer.

Dave

Worth a try. It is just that you will get more noise in the background sky with so low a level of signal, even if it is enough to bring out the stars nicely - which it has.

Olly

[blackparticle]

Nice one Dave,

Not sure you caught my comment in the other thread. Can you post up one of the the single subs from this? I'm really curious to know what the DSLR is capturing at 5mins.

Cheers-Alan

[Dave Smith]

Hi Alan

Yes I did see your request, but have been a bit busy today. I hope this is what you want. These are a single frame that has been converted to tif (from RAW) and then stretched in photoshop but nothing else except reduced in size and saved as a jpg for posting here.

As before one is the full field of view and the other a crop to enable the finer detail to be seen. The blue colour is due to me using a CLS light pollution filter which Deep Sky Stacker can correct. You need to click on the thumbnails to see them at full size.

Dave

[blackparticle]

Cheers Dave.

That's very useful to see. Even though my 6 minute stack doesn't have the same depth as your single 5 min sub, it does give me hope that I can get a lot more detail out of shooting short 6-second exposures, even if the individual subs appear somewhat devoid of information.

Alan