M13 - the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules

[szymon]

Taken yesterday as a by-product of my trying (and failing) to get guiding working with my homebrew guider.  I was taking 1 minute subs, and most of them were ruined by my tampering with things, but seven were left which were quite sharp so I put them together to get this:

7 x 60 second exposures plus darks (only 30s darks, whoops) and flats, stacked in DSS and post-processed as 16bit tiff with Gimp 2.9.  My polar alignment wasn't dead on (Synscan reported mel -28'35" max +36'33"), but it seems that's enough for reasonable 60 second unguided subs.

-simon

[VigdisVZ]

I'd say your PA was pretty good, that image is very sharp. You used the 200p on HEQ5?

You probably might want to tune back the processing a bit however, background is burned out, it's very sharp and some of the stars have gone green.

Keep em coming!

[szymon]

Yes, this was the 200P with HEQ5 and Canon 6D, with 13kg of counterweights.  I was quite happy to get 60s subs unguided to be honest, it means my polar alignment is improving, but it's clearly still off according to the Synscan handset with three star alignment.

Agreed on the processing.  I did it this way because I wanted to bring out the internals of the cluster as much as I could, hence the slightly odd colouring, I think it "sort of works" (and there's millions of images of M13 already out there that have 'true' colours!).

-simon