Oh no - I have Globular fever !

[**Space*Hopper**]

Hi all,

Last night had the best skies I have seen for ages so I wanted to take full advantage of them and was out until around 3.30 a.m this morning (must have an early night tonight or I will be asleep at work tomorrow :nono:) Anyway after finding M5 the night before I was determined to try and find M13 and after much searching around the sky find it I did :hello1:

Fed up with the infamous street light that plagues my imaging, I tried moving my scope and mount off the patio area at the bottom of my garden and back towards the house where it is more shelterd by an ivy covered wall. Although this somewhat limits my field of view it turned out to be a perfect location for M13 and I was rewarded with a much darker sky and many more visible stars Setup was made quicker by something that I had read in another post here that I did not appreciate in that it is not necessary to level the tripod, you only need to polar align, I tried it and sure enough it works :hello1: and again my EQ5 clone tracked accurately for many hours without the need for any tweaking at all, (words cannot express how pleased I am with this mount).

I then proceeded to image, with my lcd remote shutter release taking picture after picture after picture and from the subs I kept seeing appear on the camera lcd screen I was very optimistic that this was going to be something special When I off loaded the subs onto the laptop i was therefore a little bit disapointed that out of the 70+ subs taken, only 11 met the grade . This is a far smaller % than previously seen with my EQ5 clone mount so I can only assume that it is due to it being on grass rather than the patio so this is definitely something I will have to try and find a solution to for future sessions from this position in the garden.

Anyway even from a quick mess around in the early hours of this morning with a single sub, I was still confident that the result was still going to be pleasing to me and now that I have had a go at stacking and processing the 11 good subs I am very pleased and can honestly say that this is the most beautiful Globular I have imaged so far :hello1:

So here are 2 images, 1 with a very nice core but also a 2nd in which I tried to bring out more stars but in doing so think I might have overdone the core a bit, (I still have lots to learn about processing). I think I like the one with more stars best but will let you decide which one you prefer.

Either way I am very happy with the results which are the sum of 11 subs ranging from 17 to 45 seconds, (total exposure time of just over 6 minutes), with 3 dark frames.

Hope you enjoy these as much as I am

:wave:

Ian

P.S. Is that a galaxy in the bottom left ?

[algol]

nice pics there mate hoping to get out there myself tonight

[jcm]

Nice capture , Ian

Not sure of your orientation but the galaxy might be NGC 6207 , which is mag 12 , which looks about right.

[**Space*Hopper**]

Thanks jcm, judging by the following extract from the web it looks like you are spot on about the galaxy :

"This galaxy is of interest to amateur astronomers, not because of its own nature, but instead because it is in the direction of the remarkable globular cluster M13. Since NGC 6207 is in the vicinity, most telescopic observers always take a quick peak at this small galaxy"

[Astronut]

You've captured another galaxy too, roughly halfway between M13 and NGC 6207 and towards the upper left of the line joining the two. This is IC 4617, mag 16, alot smaller and is, from what I've read, an infamously challenging visual object without lots of aperture.

[centroid]

Really nice results Ian, your late night efforts were well rewarded.

Dave

[zhgutas]

Now THAT's what iIm talking about! Really nice M13 there, and it's specific "arms" are showing well. And a sound improvement again!

Marius

[trevboyd]

That's really nice - well done!

Trev